ARTS PETER STANFORD INSIGHT TO PREJUDICE
In the days before the Pope’s visit to Britain, the Catholic Church and its travails came under searching – sometimes hostile – scrutiny on television and radio
A
verdict on the success or other- wise of Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain must wait for the days and weeks ahead, but one conclusion
can be confidently reached already. The trip has focused the broadcasters’ spotlight on Catholicism with more intensity than I can ever remember. As well as the dignified, well- resourced coverage of the actual events provided by the BBC, in a reminder of the inestimable value to the nation of its public service remit, there has also been a procession of documentaries looking at the Pope and the Church that would never have been commis- sioned without the “hook” of Benedict’s presence here.
Some might feel it would have been a bless- ing to avoid such “trial by media”, since so much of the airtime given was taken up with the paedophile priest scandal, but at least no one can now suggest that this whole deeply disturbing crisis within Catholicism hasn’t been given an intensive and very public airing. The most thoughtful coverage was undoubt- edly that provided by the former Dominican Mark Dowd, who cropped up on both radio and television.
Dowd’s cardinal virtue was that he knew his subject inside out and therefore could enlighten his audience. Of his two outings, I preferred Dowd’s Radio 4 documentary, The Pope’s British Divisions, albeit for largely trivial reasons. The voice-only version spent more time specifically on the British experi- ence of the Church, and so it had a reassuringly familiar, even homely feel. And, because radio isn’t hamstrung by the need to provide pictures to illustrate every idea it examines, The Pope’s British Divisions was also able to address in more depth largely abstract areas, such as authority – the old clergy-laity dynamic, made more complicated by the rise and rise of the permanent diaconate. In BBC2’s Benedict: Trials of a Pope, Dowd was more concerned with confronting head- on the crimes of paedophile priests and the persistent allegations that Benedict, as a bishop and cardinal, had played some role in covering them up. While Dowd – who tagged himself a liberal, practising Catholic – entered
34 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010
no special pleading for the Pope, he did seek to cast light on both the roots of the scandal and Benedict’s reaction to it. So he sought out, for example, the Pope’s brother, Mgr Georg Ratzinger, and a family friend, to find out how upset in private Benedict is about the spate of devastating revelations. There is no weeping and gnashing of teeth during his regular phone calls home, this pair reported, but they knew, they insisted, that he was really very troubled. “Nobody sees it.” If it wasn’t quite the emphatic reply you wanted to hear, it paled as an uncomfortable moment next to an interview Dowd filmed with the papal spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi. Everything was going very smoothly until Dowd pressed this affable Jesuit on quite what the then Cardinal Ratzinger knew about the cases of paedophile priests referred to him in the 1990s and early 2000s in his role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “I don’t know what this has to do with the Pope’s visit to Britain,” the priest snapped back angrily.
If he doesn’t understand quite how uneasy
many British Catholics feel about the whole abuse scandal – however keen they are to wel- come Pope Benedict – then he is clearly in the wrong job. But his reaction seemed to reveal something even more troubling – that the Vatican still doesn’t quite get the serious- ness of the allegations against it regarding clerical abuse, and believes that it is somehow being unfairly targeted on the subject by pry- ing journalists. Had Fr Lombardi’s outburst featured in
Peter Tatchell’s Channel 4 documentary The Trouble with the Pope, the famously fearless campaigner for human rights would have made much more of a meal of it than Dowd did. For Tatchell was unapologetic from the very start about the fact that he was compiling the case for the prosecution of a church leader he held responsible for “blighting the lives of millions”. What followed was a hotchpotch of fact, prejudice and slanted reporting. Benedict was in denial about abusive priests, Tatchell claimed, ignoring the Pope’s meetings with victims of paedophile clerics – hardly evidence of denial. Benedict was in league
Mark Dowd gets close to his subject in Benedict: Trials of a Pope (BBC2)
with a Holocaust denier (the obnoxious Bishop Richard Williamson), Tatchell continued. Again there wasn’t even a nod at the Pope’s extraordinary and anguished letter to bishops on this whole affair. Fergal Keane is famed for his empathy, and
his Panorama special on BBC1, “What the Pope Knew”, lay bare in shaming detail the damage done to the victims of paedophile priests and the pain that will remain with them throughout their lives. The title of his documentary, though, hinted at a “smoking gun” that would advance the case already made against Benedict for his handling of the crisis. Instead, it fell back on an already familiar charge – that the Pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, had dithered at great length when decisions on punishing abusers were required of him. If anyone truly doubted the anguish he feels
today about the scandal that has dominated his papacy, BBC Four’s Vatican: The Hidden World, provided the sort of insight into Benedict’s state of mind that his brother and family friend could not. Back in 1969, the royal family allowed the TV cameras behind the scenes in Buckingham Palace in an effort to start a dialogue with the modern world. It has only taken the Vatican four decades to follow suit and grant unparalleled access to the papal apartments, reception rooms, the sacristy of St Peter’s and even the not-so-Secret Archives. A single image from this fascinating film will remain with me for a long time – an extra - ordinary close-up of Pope Benedict deep in prayer in his private chapel. The weight on his shoulders may not have been literally vis- ible, but the pain in his eyes certainly was. Here was an 83-year-old struggling in unprece- dented circumstances in a job that, even in calmer times, is beyond one individual.
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