The job of a religious news journalist consists of talking to Christians ...

By Deacon Nick Donnelly, on March 26th, 2013

Andrew Brown, a religion correspondent of The Guardian, has made ?cynical self-revealing ?comments ?about his attitude to religious journalism in response to alleged?comments?attribute to Cardinal Bergoglio about journalists. These comments by the Holy Father may well be another made up ?urban legend? but what is interesting is what this story reveals about a leading UK religion correspondent?s cynical attitude to his work:

?Pope Francis gives his first press conference today but he will not give interviews. He does not like the press. ?Journalists?,?he said?once ?risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia?. In case your Greek is deficient, this means that we love shit and encourage others to consume it. So are we really bluebottles ? noisy carriers of filth who get everywhere, and rest only to preen their glittering bodies, convinced their blue-green and metallic sheen is the most fashionable colour in the world? Of course, many religious people would extend this analogy to point out that flies serve their lord, Beelzebub, and they swarm around the world.?

A religious journalist might respond that the world we cover serves up plenty to sate the coprophiliac appetite. If you?re a religious news journalist most of your job consists of talking to Christians so that they can tell you lies about each other. If you cover the Vatican, this is certainly true. I don?t know anyone who has been converted by the people they cover.

I also know a hell of a lot of bluebottles. There is something profoundly phony about journalism, and the more it pretends to offer personal insights, the phonier it gets. Reading almost any interview bears the same relationship to taking part in a conversation with the subject as watching porn does to making love. In both cases it?s actors faking it for the money that strangers will give them because they enjoy the spectacle. Anyone who becomes famous for their opinions will find that the audience wants them to become a karaoke act miming to the hit that made them famous.?

Protect the Pope comment: It?s the global nature of Andrew Brown?s condemnation of Christians and the Vatican as liars that shows that this is more about his mental state than about reality. ?He proposes as evidence of the truth of his assertion the fact that he doesn?t know anyone who has been converted by the people they cover?. Maybe that tells us more about him and the people he mixes with than the truth of the matter.

The German journalist Peter Seewald admits that he approached his ?first interview with Cardinal Ratzinger with a similar degree of cynicism and?prejudice, but his encounters with the cardinal eventually led to his conversion from secular atheism to Catholicism.??Maybe Andrew Brown would benefit from having a conversation with Peter Seewald.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/mar/16/pope-francis-bluebottles-humanity

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Source: http://protectthepope.com/?p=7049

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