'THE MEDIA DARLING'

MrC reflects on the candidacy of Mr Sentamu for ++ABC

OCCUPY WALL STREET - THE NO-SPIN ZONE

From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you.
....

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

The media and a good many other folks want simple explanations from the protestors for why they are there, sound bites for those with short attention spans...sort of like a political campaign that stays on message. Of course, the protestors at OWC have the sound bites on their signs. But wait! The signs are often amateur jobs, obviously not paid for by the Koch brothers and their ilk, and they don't all say the same thing. Oooh, it's so confusing. People there have lost their jobs; others have lost their homes to the banks and mortgage companies; young people coming out of school or university can't find jobs. The homeless are present. The miseries are many. And to confuse the situation even further, there are those who are fairly well off themselves but wish to join in solidarity with the dispossessed, because, as Archbishop Óscar Romero, the martyr and advocate for the poor in San Salvador, said, “Let those who have a voice, speak out for the voiceless.” And who knows? They/we could be next.

Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.

By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance.

The media pundits look sillier and sillier - as if they didn't look silly enough already.

See the splendid cartoon titled 'The Silent Majority'.

I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!

From the AP via the Times-Picayune:

It was the Catholic calendar's holiest moment — the Mass celebrating the resurrection of Christ. But with Pope Benedict XVI accused of failing to protect children from abusive priests, Easter Sunday also was a high-profile opportunity to play defense.

"Holy Father, on your side are the people of God," Cardinal Angelo Sodano told the pontiff, whom victims of clergy sexual abuse accuse of helping to shape and perpetuate a climate of cover-up. Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, dismissed those claims as "petty gossip."

The ringing tribute at the start of a Mass attended by tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square marked an unusual departure from the Vatican's Easter rituals, infusing the tradition-steeped religious ceremony with an air of a papal pep rally.

Dressed in gold robes and shielded from a cool drizzle by a canopy, Benedict looked weary during much of the Mass, the highlight of a heavy Holy Week schedule. But as he listened intently to Sodano's paean, a smile broke across the pope's face, and when the cardinal finished speaking, Benedict rose from his chair in front of the altar to embrace him.

"[A]n air of a pep rally"? I suppose the characterization will be labeled as more persecution by the media.

Jewish leaders, and even some top Catholic churchmen, were angered after Benedict's personal preacher, in a Good Friday sermon, likened the growing accusations against the pope to the campaign of anti-Semitic violence that culminated in the Holocaust.

The preacher, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, told Corriere della Sera daily in an interview Sunday that he had no intention "of hurting the sensibilities of the Jews and of the victims of pedophilia," expressed regret and asked for forgiveness.

He was quoted as saying that the pope wasn't aware of what the sermon would say beforehand, and that no Vatican officials read the text before the Good Friday service.

The apology satisfied one Jewish leader, Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

"Now that he has apologized and the Vatican has distanced itself from those remarks, the matter is closed," Steinberg said in a statement.

Since Fr Cantalamessa apologized, I won't say more about the matter, either.

Meanwhile back in Anglicanland comes another apology.

From the BBC:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has expressed his "deep sorrow" for any difficulties caused by his comments about the Catholic Church in Ireland.

His claim that the Church had lost all credibility because of its handling of child abuse by priests was criticised by both Catholic and Anglican clergy.

The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said he was "stunned".

Dr Rowan Williams later telephoned Archbishop Martin to insist he meant no offence to the Irish Catholic Church.

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said Dr Williams' words represented unusually damning criticism from the leader of another Church.

Did Archbishop Williams speak anything but the truth? It seems to me that he had nothing for which to apologize. Once again, the ABC waffles and ends up pleasing no one.

BREATHTAKING!

From the Times:

A defiant Pope Benedict XVI indicated yesterday that he would not be intimidated by the clerical sex abuse crisis now engulfing the Church and threatening to undermine his authority.

Speaking during Palm Sunday Mass, he said that faith in Christ “helps lead us towards courage which does not allow us to be intimidated by the chatter of dominant opinions”.
....

Father Lombardi said: “The recent media attacks have without doubt caused damage. But the authority of the Pope and the commitment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith against sex abuse of minors will come out of this not weakened but strengthened.”

The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, defended the Pope, saying that he was at the forefront of efforts to tackle the problem of clerical sex abuse. The archbishop told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One: “The Pope will not resign. Frankly there is no strong reason for him to do so. In fact, it is the other way around. He is the one above all else in Rome that has tackled this thing head on.” (My emphasis)

The RCC tries the "putting facts on the ground" strategy. Just keep saying the words, and they will come to be true. The magic words will not work this time around. The pope and his close advisors are in denial about the damage to their moral authority, which is in shreds at the present time. New revelations of older abuse will probably continue to come to light. The pope's problems are not behind him, and he and his advisors will need to come out of denial if the church is to make a new beginning and the powers in the church restore to themselves any sort of credibility.

H/T to Mark Harris at Preludium for the link to the article in the Times.