The death of a pope is like a World Series Day for religion reporters, who know that whatever they write will show up on the front page — alongside whatever Associated Press dispatches come from Rome.
This time around, papal coverage was strung together with a collection of work by beat specialists, columnists, general assignment reporters dragooned into doing pope coverage and retired folks brought in for a one-off and Catholic insiders. As the religion beat has been eviscerated at so many outlets, media managers aren’t sure where to turn when a major story like a papal death comes up,
So, when word came out last week that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was rapidly failing, newsrooms quickly called in whomever they knew could whip up a re-telling of this fascinating man’s life.
The timing flummoxed publications that had come out early with their list of notable 2022 deaths, only to have to add not only Benedict but broadcaster Barbara Walters and Brazilian soccer king Pelé, both of whom also died in the closing days of the year.
Naturally I jumped at the chance to do something for Newsweek (I’m their religion correspondent), so I began perusing what was already out there. I found a wave of hatred and ill will in the secular media for this traditional Catholic leader.
Topping the list was a tweet — since deleted — posted by Politico cybersecurity reporter calling Benedict a “Hitler Youth alumnus” and “homophobic pedophile protector,” both of which were below-the-belt blows in that all German boys in the early 1940s were dragooned into joining Hitler Youth.
As for the latter accusation, it was Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who saw how bishops were passing the buck on pedophile clergy in their dioceses — which is why he ordered all cases of credibly accused priests and deacons sent to his office at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith so he could defrock these people. That was in 2001.
Geller’s tweet was flagged by Florida Gov. Tom DeSantis’s deputy press secretary Jeremy Redfern who taunted Geller for his lack of objectivity. Quite frankly, I’ve known reporters who’ve been fired for less. Also disturbing were the comments, most of which retorted that Geller was correct, so what’s the problem?
A lot of media treatment of Benedict was lukewarm at best. This NPR story is an example, as it spends much ink on Benedict’s “several bad decisions.” They found one historian willing to label his tenure “a failure.”
That’s a bit of a stretch.
Church historian Massimo Faggioli said he believes that by approaching the world from a purely intellectual and theological perspective, Benedict's papacy was ultimately a failure. "Because to be pope you are not the theologian-in-chief, you are the pastor-in-chief. That's the magic of the papal office," Faggioli said.
Yet the historian said the real legacy of Benedict's papacy was how he ended it. "Benedict XVI's decision to resign was a very radical interpretation of Vatican II," Faggioli said. "Going beyond the letter of Vatican II, that was revolutionary."
The big theme for many was The Resignation — Benedict’s decision in February 2013 to step down and surrender power. It was the first time in 600 years that a pope had willingly given up power by stepping down. A massive New York Times piece touched on this theme:
At the time of his resignation, his decision to step down humbled and humanized a pope whose papacy had become associated with tempests. There were tangles with Jews, Muslims and Anglicans, and with progressive Catholics, who were distressed by his overtures to the most traditionalist fringes of the Catholic world.
That was commentary, of course, in the middle of a news report.
A number of commentators, such as Marc Thiessen writing for the Washington Post, argued that Benedict simply goofed up big time by resigning.
As his own health worsened in 2013, Benedict relinquished the chair of St. Peter “for the good of the church.” No doubt Benedict, who died Saturday at age 95, did it out of a selfless love for God’s people, whom he felt he could no longer adequately serve. But nearly a decade later, we know his abdication was a terrible, tragic mistake.
Ross Douthat’s New York Times Sunday column “The First Afterlife of Pope Benedict,” basically says the same thing. The pattern, as always: Conservative views are commentary. Liberal takes on Benedict XVI are “hard news.” Here is Douthat:
What the resignation yielded, though, was not what Benedict had presumably expected. The assembled cardinals chose an unpredictable outsider as his successor rather than another conservative. And the Francis pontificate was quickly defined by a sweeping push for liberalization, a striking shift of personnel and policy and a reopening of many of the 1970s-era debates that Benedict had tried to settle.
I rather liked much of the content in the Times news piece, which I thought it more fair than a lot of stuff out there because it admitted that Benedict had been the victim of really bad timing.
Whereas John Paul II -– who appears to have ignored the sexual abuse crisis –- was hailed as a saint, Benedict got the full brunt of the crisis as it was made public in the aughts.
People forget too that it was Benedict who put the quash on former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2006 to resign early from the Washington see. (And a few years later, Benedict laid further restrictions on McCarrick, which McCarrick ignored). McCarrick was the cardinal who had been sexually abusing seminarians — and minors as it turned out — during the 1970s and 1980s when in the Newark and New York archdioceses.
Maybe Benedict didn’t do as much as he could have, but he did more than any other pope had up until that point.
One distressing trend I saw when reading the main pieces on Benedict was seeing in-house religion reporters being shunted aside for outside experts or old-timers brought in to do the job. That was the case with the above-mentioned Times piece (although former religion writer Laurie Goodstein was mentioned in the tagline as assisting). The Wall Street Journal articles have (almost exclusively) been written by their Vatican correspondent Francis Rocca, while the religion-beat writer was nowhere to be seen (reassigned to the Ukraine apparently). The Los Angeles Times provided this video, but has used Associated Press pieces. A deputy news editor wrote the official obituary. I saw nothing from their staff religion reporter.
Catholic strongholds like Chicago didn’t get anything better. The Chicago Tribune ran an AP story announcing the death. The Chicago Sun-Times did a local tie-in by a general assignment reporter.
A word of personal commentary: This is a sore point with me dating back to 1987, when I was one of two religion reporters for the Houston Chronicle. And when John Paul II decided to tour the United States, both religion reporters in the features department were overlooked, and a star from the news side was brought in to do the main stories. I had to fight to be included among their four reporters who covered the papal trip itself.
Me covering Benedict in New York in 2008.
Fortunately I didn’t encounter the same treatment when covering Benedict’s 2008 papal tour in Washington and New York for the Washington Times.
Other publications with no religion reporter called in the old hands.
Time magazine, which hasn’t replaced Elizabeth Dias ever since she decamped for the New York Times, brought in their former religion specialist David Van Biema for this very good essay. A sample:
If Benedict had not resigned, Francis would obviously not be Pope. But even if Benedict had just soldiered on for four years before resigning, Francis, who was 76 at the time he was chosen to succeed him, would probably never have been Pope—after age 80 Cardinals no longer attend the conclaves from which all modern pontiffs have been chosen. Instead, laments (First Things editor R.R.) Reno, “we’re revisiting all the things that we fought about in the ’70s,” prior to John Paul’s papacy. “It’s all back.”
I’m glad Van Biema was available, but surely a magazine that size can afford one religion reporter?
As for me, I saw that some of Newsweek’s London-based writers were covering the papal death, so I was told to find a higher-up who had a unique point of view. Fortunately, I’d done a Q&A the year before with San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone -– about Nancy Pelosi, abortion politics, Joe Biden and more. Thus, on the last day of the year, I called again, asking what he could say about the late pope.
“He was the most misunderstood major personality of our lifetime,” he responded and with that, I knew I had a story.
Elsewhere, there’s a lot of really good stuff out there — try the Catholic website Crux Now for some of it, including a rendering in English of an Italian-language interview with Benedict’s personal secretary, German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who tells how the pope decided to resign six months before his February 2013 announcement. He also describes intense level of spiritual warfare surrounding the pontiff.
Be sure to read John Allen’s “pope of ironies” essay., also in Crux. One key paragraph:
From a strictly PR point of view, Benedict may have been the unluckiest man to take over leadership of the Catholic Church in centuries. Sandwiched between two celebrity popes in John Paul II and Francis, the shy and cerebral Benedict was perhaps always destined to be under-appreciated.
Sometimes the substack publications shone. Irish writer John Waters had this to say about media treatment of Benedict:
In these days of mass hypnosis by nonsense and mendacity, slurs and smears travel farther and faster than words of beauty and hope. So, for our catchword-clotted media, Ratzinger was the ‘grim enforcer’, the ‘Panzer-Cardinal’, The ‘Pope’s Policeman’, ‘God’s Rottweiler’, a renegade ‘liberal’ who had become an implacable enemy of ‘progress’, the ‘Man who couldn’t laugh’. …
I covered Benedict’s election in Rome in April 2005 and yes, many of those titles were in the headlines the next day.
The bottom line: As a longtime loyal lieutenant of Pope John Paul II, the fact that he was widely regarded as the most brilliant theologian of his time cut little ice with media commentators.
In truth, journalists regarded him as the worst of all possible popes: traditionalist, reticent, soft-spoken, given to long and complex sentences, and utterly rejecting of their progressive view of an evolving world. Benedict was, by the secular media analysis, a stop-gap and a throwback, a reactionary, a “right-winger,” an obscurantist.
Not only did many outlets not have a religion reporter, this major story broke over a three-day holiday. (It’s been my experience that any major death in the world of religion tends to happen during three-day weekends and other inconvenient times). Judging from the number of haters out there on social media, it seems that publications that only use wire reports don’t inform their readers well of the complexity of people like Pope Benedict XVI. Instead, people take their cues from Twitter.
Once you label and define a public personality in negative terms, it’s next to impossible to change public perceptions. The haters out there remember how Benedict was pilloried in elite media again and again so is it any wonder that they repeat back what they once heard?
It takes a lot of hard work to portray both sides of a complex religious issue or person. Sadly, Benedict was tarred and feathered too many times in the past. Is it a wonder, then, that when he dies, the mainstream response is hate?
FIRST IMAGE: Screenshot of Fox News report on death of Pope Benedict XVI, taken from the network’s social-media feed on Facebook.