I have been reading a lot of Catholic bloggers since Pope Benedict XVI's resignation announcement last Monday. Given that what might be described as the "conservative" or "traditionalist" or "orthodox" wing of the Catholic Church doesn't get much of a hearing on the BBC (and certainly hasn't in the BBC News website's coverage this week), I wanted to hear the "other perspective" on Pope Benedict. The blogs I've been reading have supplied that other perspective.
I am very glad I did. I already knew of the huge affection and admiration felt for the outgoing Pope by a sizeable portion of British Catholics. As younger British Catholics seem to have been turning away from the liberal, 'Spirit of Vatican II' attitudes of the older generation, this does seem (from the outside) to be where the pulse of British Catholicism is beating most strongly now. Pope Benedict has been their pope and the shock and sadness at the news of his resignation has been striking to observe, and moving to read.
As readers of this blog will know, parts of the BBC have been reluctant to give this perspective the time it deserves.
If you recall my post detailing the extraordinary biasing of Radio 4's Sunday programme towards liberal Catholicism - particularly the liberal Catholic magazine The Tablet -
then you will perhaps already be aware of the problem...and it is a problem if a corporation that commits itself to impartiality by offering all significant perspectives on an issue a fair hearing then fails to do so on a grand scale.
Sunday's Edward Stourton, who is also Radio 4's go-to man for important documentaries on matters Roman Catholic - as well as being a trustee of The Tablet - presented a documentary on Radio 4 last night entitled In Search of the Real Pope Benedict. Trailers promised a "reassessing" of Benedict XVI that would contain "surprises". Very little of it surprised me and the promised reassessment sounded very much like the same old thing that I've been hearing month in and month our on Sunday over the last couple of years.
Edward Stourton is an excellent story teller and told this particular story well. He is, however, a liberal Catholic and that shone through everything he said last night. For all his attempts at generosity towards a Pope whose views he clearly has little sympathy for, the programme came across to me as being something of a hatchet job.
This was partly brought about by the cast of 'talking heads' Edward elected to use.
I'm sure you will agree with me that it would be a good, impartial, BBC sort of thing for Edward Stourton to have used a broad range of Catholic perspectives to give us, his listeners, a fully rounded view of the subject. Therefore, you would have expected to hear from conservatives, traditionalists and other strong admirers of Benedict XVI as well as liberals, modernisers and strong critics of Benedict XVI. That's surely the least we could expect. Surely?
What we got, however, was a stream of liberal Catholic voices, similar (often identical) to that offered on Sunday itself in recent years.
I'll list all the contributors first:
Rupert Shortt, biographer
Georg Ratzinger, brother of Benedict XVI
John Wilkins, former editor of the Tablet
Fr Gerald O'Collins, theologian
Mark Dowd, writer and broadcaster
Hans Küng, theologian
Fr Timothy Radcliffe, former head of the Domicans
Marco Politi, Vatican watcher
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, former head of the Church in England and Wales
Dom Edmund Power, Abbot of St Paul Outside the Walls
Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi
Tina Beattie, theologian
Michael Walsh, papal historian
There are certain points that can be made about the people on this list.
Several of them have close links, like Edward Stourton, to The Tablet. Besides its former editor John Wilkins, we have Tablet director Tina Beattie and former assistant editor of The Tablet Rupert Shortt. Several of the others are frequent Tablet contributors. As Edward Stourton watchers might expect, there was no counterbalancing selection of 'talking heads' from the more traditionalist, pro-Benedict Catholic Herald. This was largely a Tablet 'family affair', so to speak. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose. (What's that in Latin?)
More obviously, this list contains an overwhelming preponderance of liberal Catholics, from the highly controversial ultra-liberal arch-critic of the Pope, Hans Küng (to be crude for other non-Catholic readers, perhaps think: 'the Tony Benn of Catholic politics'), and that bogeywoman of many a Catholic conservative, the radical Tina Beattie (to be no less crude for others non-Catholics, perhaps think: 'the Polly Toynbee of Catholic issues'), through to John Wilkins, the man who steered The Tablet to the left; the left-liberal Italian journalist Marco Politi; historian and self-declared "liberal" Michael Walsh; Fr Timothy Radcliffe, whose liberal positions have got him into difficulties with the Vatican; and the activist Mark Dowd (see a few posts ago). Even Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is generally considered to be on the Church's liberal wing.
Now, to give you a sense of how certain of these voices dominated the programme, I'll list them again in the order they spoke:
Rupert Shortt
Georg Ratzinger
John Wilkins
Rupert Shortt
Fr Gerald O'Collins
Mark Dowd
Rupert Shortt
John Wilkins
Hans Küng
Fr Gerald O'Collins
Hans Küng
Rupert Shortt
Rupert Shortt
Georg Ratzinger
John Wilkins
Fr Timothy Radcliffe
Marco Politi
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Hans Küng
Fr Timothy Radcliffe
John Wilkins
Fr Timothy Radcliffe
Marco Politi
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Dom Edmund Power
John Wilkins
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Lord Sacks
Tina Beattie
Marco Politi
Michael Walsh
Tina Beattie
Michael Walsh
Lord Sacks
Tina Beattie
Mark Dowd
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
Marco Politi
Michael Walsh
We were given the received liberal interpretation of Church history, with all the familiar assessments of Vatican II, John Paul II, etc. The liberal 'talking heads' expressed their early fears about Benedict and spent a good deal of time running down his papacy. There were fleeting charitable word for the Pope, though they usually came when after he did something that failed to conform to their image of him as an arch-conservative. The element of reassessment seemed to amount to admitting a few of these less-offensive-to-liberal-sensibilities aspects of the Pope's career. A tone of polite sourness was, however, the dominant note.
The concession that Pope Benedict's visit to Britain had been much more of a success than expected brought a selection of contemporary Catholic vox pops which, given what had just been said, might have been expected to back that up; however, the selection chosen was one positive, one grudging and one hostile.
All of this is not to say that a well-written and well-presented liberal Catholic account of Pope Benedict isn't of great value. My concern is that the programme made no admission that that's precisely what it was. Instead, it was Ed Stourton of the BBC's authoritative, definitive take on Pope Benedict, impartiality guaranteed, BBC-style. Ed Stourton will doubtless think of it as being just that. So will BBC Radio 4's powers-that-be. It's the way they think after all. Will non-Catholic and secularist listeners mind? Will liberal Catholic listeners mind?
However, In Search of the Real Pope Benedict was very far from being an impartial take. It was parti pris. It excluded conservative traditionalists. It excluded enthusiastic admirers of Pope Benedict. It failed to account for why Pope Benedict has been so loved by a significant number of people within his Church. It refused to provide positive interpretations of his theological pronouncements. It simply wasn't interested in reporting such things. I am hopeful that many non-Catholic, secularist and liberal Catholics will see that that's not playing fair, even if the bias is working in their favour, and share my feeling that something's seriously wrong here.
One-sided documentaries like this are surely incompatible with the BBC's editorial guidelines on impartiality:
Impartiality lies at the heart of public service and is the core of the BBC's commitment to its audiences. It applies to all our output and services - television, radio, online, and in our international services and commercial magazines. We must be inclusive, considering the broad perspective and ensuring the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected.
The BBC Agreement forbids our output from expressing the opinion of the BBC on current affairs or matters of public policy, other than broadcasting or the provision of online services.Imagine if this documentary had been about a political figure, the howls of protest would have been heard across the blogosphere. Imagine a major BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Lord Patten about Margaret Thatcher which had only interviewed her political opponents from within and outside of the Conservative Party and which failed to include a single strong admirer of the Iron Lady. Well, I suspect that's what In Search of the Real Pope Benedict felt like for supporters of Pope Benedict.
Is BBC Radio 4 too secular, too liberal to even recognise its own bias?
UPDATE: The Catholic Herald's Francis Phillips (how often do you here her on BBC Radio 4?) evidently feels much the same way about this programme:
On Benedict XVI, the BBC is already writing the first draft of history
The Catholic liberal elite dominate the corporation
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