A few years ago, I formulated a working hypothesis that has guided my professional efforts as an editor ever since. It goes something like this: The more widely reported the remarks of a significant religious leader are, the less consequent they are likely to be.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve since come to the conclusion that the likelihood of this hypothesis being true increases exponentially if the religious leader in question happens to be the pope.<\/p>\n Just take Pope Francis\u2019s remarks<\/a> concerning the compatibility of evolution with the Christian understanding of God\u2019s role in creation<\/a>. There was nothing particularly original or even interesting about what he said. After all, did not the Blessed John Henry Newman write in 1869, \u201cIt does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter\u201d? And was it not the Belgian Jesuit Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre who first advanced the \u201chypothesis of the primeval atom\u201d in 1931 \u2013 a thesis (now more popularly known as \u201cthe Big Bang\u201d) which was itself widely ridiculed as a form of pseudo-scientific theism? And did not Joseph Ratzinger<\/a> state quite bluntly back in 1986:<\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God \u2026 does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the \u2018project\u2019 of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary \u2013 rather than mutually exclusive \u2013 realities.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But the inverse of my working hypothesis also applies: statements that truly are significant rarely receive the public attention they deserve. Consider the pope\u2019s recent address to the European Parliament<\/a>. The media\u2019s coverage, such as it was, fixated on his admittedly impressionistic, rather cliche quip that Europe today seems \u201csomewhat elderly and haggard, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world which frequently regards it with aloofness, mistrust and even, at times, suspicion.\u201d Meanwhile, his more urgent appeal for European society to reforge the bond between human dignity and transcendence was passed over as a perfunctory nod to certain \u201chot button\u201d issues.<\/p>\n Yet the media thereby spectacularly skirted the theological heart of Pope Francis\u2019s address, in which he gave us the clearest display yet of his own peculiar appropriation of the vast tradition of Catholic social teaching and his undeniable debt to the thought of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Consider the following emblematic passage:<\/p>\n \u201cToday there is a tendency to claim ever broader individual rights \u2026 [U]nderlying this is a conception of the human person as detached from all social and anthropological contexts, as if the person were a \u2018monad\u2019 (monas), increasingly unconcerned with other surrounding \u2018monads\u2019. The equally essential and complementary concept of duty no longer seems to be linked to such a concept of rights. As a result, the rights of the individual are upheld, without regard for the fact that each human being is part of a social context wherein his or her rights and duties are bound up with those of others and with the common good of society itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Not coincidentally, Francis goes on to cite Benedict\u2019s encyclical Caritas in Veritate<\/a>, in order to underscore his fundamental contention that \u201cit is vital to develop a culture of human rights which wisely links the individual, or better, the personal aspect, to that of the common good, of the \u2018\u201dall of us\u201d made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society\u2019.\u201d The pope then adds the prescient warning that, \u201cunless the rights of each individual are harmoniously ordered to the greater good, those rights will end up being considered limitless and consequently will become a source of conflicts and violence.\u201d<\/span> A few years ago, I formulated a working hypothesis that has guided my professional efforts as an editor ever since. It goes something like this: The more widely reported the remarks of a significant religious leader are, the less consequent they are likely to be. I\u2019ve since come to the conclusion that the likelihood of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThat the media should have deemed the pope\u2019s remarks as being in any way newsworthy \u2013 that is, as confirming the putatively progressive agenda they\u2019ve assigned to him<\/a> \u2013 says more about the media\u2019s religious illiteracy than it does about the substance of Christian belief (as if confessionally orthodox Christians were, by necessity, crass literalists or closet creationists).<\/span><\/p>\n
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