The media's neglect of Benedict XVI

It can’t be said enough that John Allen is a terrific writer who knows his stuff. Can anyone forget his mesmerizing reports on the final illness, death and funeral of John Paul II and the subsequent election of Benedict XVI? One reads Allen and feels like one is at the Vatican, privvy to all the detail and reason that never seems to make it into the secular press.

And speaking of what does not make it into secular press, Allen writes here that this pope is being monumentally ignored by the NY Times (hence, the mainstream media) at an interesting point in history.

As the annual glut of year-end analysis and “Top Ten/Bottom Ten” lists draws to a close, here’s one striking fact about 2007 that so far no one seems to have highlighted: In this entire 12-month period, Pope Benedict XVI finished on the front page of the New York Times exactly twice.
[…]
To grasp the significance of this result, consider that 2007 was essentially Benedict’s third year as pope. By way of comparison, John Paul II in his third year finished on the front page of the Times a robust 25 times. Even setting aside the 13 pieces devoted to the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt, John Paul still outpaced Benedict as a newsmaker at a comparable point roughly six-to-one.

[…]I suspect the more decisive factor was Benedict’s “back to basics” message in 2007. His core focus was Christ, especially the indispensability of Christ for efforts to build a more humane world. That was the scarlet thread running through his speeches in Brazil, it was the heart of his book Jesus of Nazareth, and it surfaced repeatedly in his other writings and addresses.

Frankly, a pope preaching Christ simply comes off as “dog bites man” stuff to most news editors.

Yet beneath this veneer of familiarity, there was something original about the way Benedict presented the Christian basics in 2007, so much so that I would nominate it as perhaps the year’s most important neglected papal story. To put the story in a sound-bite, I would call it the emergence of “Affirmative Orthodoxy” as an interpretive key to Benedict’s papacy.

By “affirmative orthodoxy,” I mean a tenacious defense of the core elements of classic Catholic doctrine, but presented in a relentlessly positive key. Benedict appears convinced that the gap between the faith and contemporary secular culture, which Paul VI called “the drama of our time,” has its roots in Europe dating from the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the Enlightenment, with a resulting tendency to see Christianity as a largely negative system of prohibitions and controls. In effect, Benedict’s project is to reintroduce Christianity from the ground up, in terms of what it’s for rather than what it’s against.

Yes, interesting stuff! Read the whole thing – particularly the interview excerpts. Food for thought.

Related: If you’ve been hankering to view John Paul’s splendid funeral again (and for some reason, I have – maybe I’m hungering for beauty and harmony during this mad election season) this is a good link.