ROME — Amid the drama and sorrow of press reports during the funeral of Pope John Paul II last year, one was accidentally amusing.

“Tucked under [John Paul’s] left arm,” wrote a correspondent for The New York Times, “was the silver staff, called the crow’s ear, that he had carried in public.” The word, of course, should be crosier, but the fact escaped both the writer and the copy editor.

It may have been a small mistake, but it was symptomatic of the widespread ignorance of the Church in the mainstream media — a shortcoming that often leads to misrepresentations of the faith. How to tackle this problem, both inside and outside the Church, was the central theme of a Rome conference at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross April 27-29, entitled “Strategic Management of Church Communications:  New Challenges, New Proposals.” 

Archbishop Angelo Amato, Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, helped identify the roots of the problem for conference participants by noting how contemporary religious ignorance is rooted in a “nihilist, relativist and biotechnological culture.” Such a culture, he said, results in the denial of truth in the secular world, producing an “impossible chimera” that causes people to “float in the midst of a thousand opinions.”

In this atmosphere the Christian message is incomprehensible to many people, Archbishop Amato warned.

“Today we are living in a sort of virtual reality that doesn’t correspond to the truth of things, so that anything that doesn’t fit into that ‘reality’ results in the manipulation of people, of events and of history,” the archbishop said.

Da Vinci Code Boycott

The world of today suffers from an “extreme cultural poverty,” Archbishop Amato said, which makes it harder for Christians to discern anti-Christian propaganda. This cultural poverty, the Vatican official added, has fueled the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Archbishop Amato called for a boycott of the movie version of the book, saying that the work is “full of lies, calumnies, offenses and historical and theological errors.” He noted how a boycott of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988 harmed that film’s revenues.

At the same time, Archbishop Amato recommended Church communicators concentrate on assimilating and disseminating the positive aspects of Church documents, rather than focusing on polemics.

Archbishop Amato said the role of the Catholic media should be to help uphold, disseminate and assimilate the teachings of the Magisterium by giving compelling reasons for maintaining Church tradition. Catholic media should give faithful answers to the doubts of Catholics and serve as instruments of formation through creative ideas.

As an example, he mentioned how Famiglia Cristiana, an Italian Catholic magazine, recently distributed 12 classical texts of the early Church that “sold like hotcakes.”

“When you do something Catholic, providence will help you promote your work,” the archbishop said encouragingly, 

Diego Contreras, professor of information analysis at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said Church communicators could better engage the secular press by framing the stories differently by appealing to human interest. He said they also need to show humility.

Contreras stressed that Catholic communicators must command the interest of their audiences to be effective in catechesis.

“People think they already know Christianity and are looking for something else, but they don’t know about it,” Contreras said. “We need to encourage a new curiosity of the faith and here the Catholic press has an important contribution to make.”

Austen Ivereigh, spokesman for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor of Westminster, pointed out that in today’s Western culture, “the victim occupies the moral high ground” and is always given “first place in press reports.”

In light of that attitude, Ivereigh suggested Church communicators can succeed in getting their message out through the media by speaking out in defense of the victims of contemporary society, such as the unborn children killed through abortion and the elderly at risk of assisted suicide.

Dr. Navarro-Valls

The conference was wrapped up by papal spokesman Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls who recalled the momentous days of the papal transition last year.

The Spanish doctor explained that he “never expected” such a reaction to the Pope’s death, and that he still wasn’t sure whether he did the right thing to allow the media to see John Paul’s suffering until his very last days, but believed that was what John Paul desired.

“We found inspiration from his character — he didn’t care about this at all,” he said. “He wasn’t showing off his illness but just wanted to carry out his ministry to the end.”

Navarro-Valls recalled the emotion he showed at a press conference three days before John Paul died. The incident proved to be a turning point.

“Only after that moment, after that emotional reaction which was entirely unplanned, was the public convinced that the Pope was going to die,” he said.

The papal spokesman said that much of the communications strategy at the time had to be improvised, noting that there was no manual for him to consult on what to do in the event of the death of a pope.

And when, after his death, the public called for John Paul to be canonized immediately, he admitted to not knowing what position to take. So he asked Cardinal Ratzinger, then the dean of the College of Cardinals, for advice.

“Don’t worry,” replied the then-cardinal. “The next Pope will deal with it.”

Edward Pentin

writes from Rome.