Alone Together: Can Moral Reflection Survive in a Media Age? Part One

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 7:58 pm by Guest Contributor

Alone Together: Can Moral Reflection Survive in a Media Age? Part One 2015-04-29T19:58:27-05:00 Guest Contributor

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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’ve 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.

Just take Pope Francis’s remarks concerning the compatibility of evolution with the Christian understanding of God’s role in creation. There was nothing particularly original or even interesting about what he said. After all, did not the Blessed John Henry Newman write in 1869, “It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter”? And was it not the Belgian Jesuit Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre who first advanced the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” in 1931 – a thesis (now more popularly known as “the Big Bang”) which was itself widely ridiculed as a form of pseudo-scientific theism? And did not Joseph Ratzinger state quite bluntly back in 1986:

“We 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 … 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 ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities.”

That the media should have deemed the pope’s remarks as being in any way newsworthy – that is, as confirming the putatively progressive agenda they’ve assigned to him – says more about the media’s religious illiteracy than it does about the substance of Christian belief (as if confessionally orthodox Christians were, by necessity, crass literalists or closet creationists).

But the inverse of my working hypothesis also applies: statements that truly are significant rarely receive the public attention they deserve. Consider the pope’s recent address to the European Parliament. The media’s coverage, such as it was, fixated on his admittedly impressionistic, rather cliche quip that Europe today seems “somewhat elderly and haggard, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world which frequently regards it with aloofness, mistrust and even, at times, suspicion.” 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 “hot button” issues.

Yet the media thereby spectacularly skirted the theological heart of Pope Francis’s 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:

“Today there is a tendency to claim ever broader individual rights … [U]nderlying this is a conception of the human person as detached from all social and anthropological contexts, as if the person were a ‘monad’ (monas), increasingly unconcerned with other surrounding ‘monads’. 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.”

Not coincidentally, Francis goes on to cite Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, in order to underscore his fundamental contention that “it 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 ‘”all of us” made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society’.” The pope then adds the prescient warning that, “unless 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.”

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