The Catholic Church and Pope Francis have made celebrity status — and true to usual tabloid misrepresentation and gossip, they are not unscathed by the bogus coverage.
Almost all news agencies, aside from Time and Slate, have blown up, twisted and confused the story. They may include the same quotes, but each is writing its own, blurred version of the truth about the Catholic Church. Typical bad media coverage could be harmless, but people believe what they read, and then confusion leads to accusations — the Church is picking and choosing, dissent on Church doctrine, inconsistency, more inconsistency — and Pandora’s box is open. Miscommunication about the Church and Pope Francis is out of control, and the frenzy needs to stop.
It seems to be the same quotes from Pope Francis: he discusses the “risk of imagining God was a magician,” and says other things like, “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws.” He also says, “God is not a demiurge,” “evolution is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve,” and finally, “The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it.” While the same quotes circulated the news articles, each one was accompanied by a different radical title and biased dialogue tags.
Here are just a few of the crazy titles and tags:
Washington Post posted “Pope Francis may believe in evolution, but 42 percent of Americans do not” and states that “(he put) himself at odds with a significant portion of Americans by saying he believed in evolution, not creationism.”
MSNBC misled the public with “Pope Francis: God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand’” and tags “declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real,” and “Breaking with his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who arguably encouraged creationism and intelligent design theory.”
The most outlandish of them all — Salon: “God is not a magician, with a magic wand: Pope Francis schools creationists” with the teaser, “The pontiff admits he believes in evolution and the Big Bang.”
What a majority of these obscured titles and articles note are two false points: (1) that Pope Francis chooses evolution over creationism and that (2) he breaks from the Church’s longstanding tradition and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. However, these incorrect assumptions are causing a hubbub of confusion about what it means to be a progressive Church.
Slate points out that the media says Pope Francis modernizes the conservative institution, but these things are not revolutionary or breaking from tradition. Many misunderstand the difference between empathy/understanding and wishy-washy inconsistencies.
Most of these articles on Pope Francis dance around the controversial “hot-button Western political issues (that) can be tied to the Pope’s statements — evolution, death penalty, gay marriage,” Time notes. However, there is not the division people think there is.
The death penalty has been discussed since Pope John Paul II and the “welcoming gays” synod over the relatio coverage was just a glance at the two-year-long dialogue.
Evolution has been acknowledged and reviewed since Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis in 1950. It was discussed with Pope John Paul II, and it was even elaborated on by Pope Benedict, the apparent “creationist opponent" to evolution. In fact, Benedict worked closely with Cardinal Schoenborn, who wrote “Finding Design in Nature,” the New York Times op-ed piece in 2005, which warns against belief in Neo-Darwinism where the evolutionary process is random and chaotic. Pope Francis reaffirms this by saying that God should not be seen as a magician or demigod that creates out of chaos, but a loving creator with a plan; this reasserts that evolution and creationism are not opposing forces.
In fact, the “father of the Big Bang theory” was Georges Lemaître, Belgian cosmologist, Catholic Priest, and once President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences — the very assembly that received Pope Francis’s speech.
While trying to stir emotions, the media has gotten the “apparent inconsistencies" and “breaks” from doctrine, predecessors, and tradition completely wrong. Some articles make weak attempts to put disclaimers that there are differences between the Catholic Church and “protestant sects,” yet they are so buried beneath the preceding click-bait biases. The Catholic Church and Pope Francis are sounding the same chorus they always have. If there is one thing to note about the Church, it is consistent.
The importance of this poor coverage and understanding of the Church has disastrous effects. People even believe satires shared on their news feed about the Pope recognizing gay marriage, possible woman pontificates and evolution trumping creation. The Church constantly meets, dialogues, reviews and agrees about discussing topics that can be approached with better understanding, love and empathy. It finds ways to bring the doctrine to the issues, rather than change the doctrine to reach a larger crowd. Before this gets out of hand anymore, people need to be educated on what the Church and Pope Francis really are saying.
Reach the columnist at jessica.m.fletcher@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @jmf1193
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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