“Admitted” Hah! Good one!

Whenever the Church restates something every educated Catholic–but no ignorant reporter–knows, the news is always treated as though the Church is finally capitulating to the beseiging hordes of modernity.

So a week or so ago, the Pope pointed out the perfectly obvious fact that Jesus was born a couple of years before 1 AD. The UK press treated this as though the Pope was prostrate on the mat with 15 modernist scholars wringing a confession out of him, instead of offering a commonplace statement any biblical scholar worth his salt would make. The real mystery is how anybody could *not* know that the date of Jesus’ birth is somewhere in the neighorhood of 5 years (I think 3-2 BC) before 1 AD. Have these people never watched the History Channel any given Christmas for the past 30 years?

Now Rome reiterates the utterly uncontroversial (outside fringe six day creationist circles) statement that Catholic faith is basically compatible with Darwin and evolutionary theories. Theistic evolution basically means “grace perfects nature” and “God made Adam from the dust of the earth reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally slowly.” The mystery is why this is treated as news, but it is. And the Telegraph informs us that the Vatican has “admitted” this. One awaits further “admissions” such as the equal dignity of men and women in the eyes of God, the “admittance” that the Bible was written by human beings and not dropped from heaven, and the “admittance” that Jesus was fully human.

Every time the media learns some elementary fact of Catholic teaching, they treat it, not as though they just learned it, but as though the Church just invented it.