In this special Flannel Panel, Cy Kellett, Joe Heschmeyer, and Chris Check respond to major media coverage following the death of Pope Francis. From NPR and CNN to The New Yorker, the panel breaks down how secular outlets have portrayed the Pope’s life and legacy—and what they often leave out. Join us for a thoughtful Catholic perspective on the headlines, the spin, and the deeper truth about Pope Francis.
Transcript:
So she had a couple reports today on National Public Radio, but here’s her kind of summing up the papacy. And I just want to. And I admit I picked what I found the most cringeworthy part of her reporting.
Francis cleaned up Vatican finances, long tainted by corruption. He created a kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals to help reform a dysfunctional bureaucracy. After exhibiting at first what some Vatican observers deemed a blind spot toward clerical pedophilia, Francis appealed to the faithful to help root out what he called the culture of death and convened an extraordinary sex abuse summit at the Vatican. And after the two conservative papacies of John Paul and Benedict focused on the primacy of church doctrine, Francis announced a year-long jubilee on the primacy of mercy.
All right, any thoughts on that reporting?
I think the jury’s out on his record of the three things that she gives him credit for.
Oh, okay. All right. That’s all right.
Cleaning up Vatican finances.
Certainly the jury is out on that. There’s a ways to go that may not even.
It’s a tricky. Yes, that’s a tough one. That’s a hard nut to crack.
Yeah, it’s a hard. Right, right.
Yes. It points to the broader secular media narrative of there were a bunch of problems in the church because the conservatives just wanted power, but then we got someone we like better and so he cleaned everything up.
And, and it’s not rooted in reality and it’s not fair to either Pope Francis or Benedict or John Paul II. There were real problems. There are real problems. I think it would be fair to say all three of those men tried in different ways to tackle and they.
All left some of those problems in.
Financial and other scandals in the Vatican. But it wasn’t like any of them just said, ah, well, we’re just going to worry about church doctrine and not worry about whether people are actually living in accordance with the gospel. That doesn’t even make sense as a critique.
I think this is something Silvia Pagioli wishes Pope Francis did to set aside doctrine and talk about love and mercy.
Yeah, it seems like a wish more than a reflection of reality. That’s true. Well, the other thing about it is I have a problem with saying you could focus or making a kind of juxtaposition. You could focus on doctrine or you could focus on mercy, because the central doctrine of the Church is mercy. That’s what the whole thing is about. That the Lord loved us so much that he came down from heaven, became one of us, died on a cross to save.
Like that’s the doctrine is a doctrinal statement.
So, right. When people use doctrine in this pejorative way and it’s. I think, let’s just be clear, she’s opining. And it’s in a pejorative way. She means the doctrines they don’t like. She doesn’t actually think doctrine is bad. I don’t think she actually has an opinion on doctrine as such.
Right.
t’s like when certain Protestants say tradition and they just mean the traditions they reject, you know, the. It’s teachings. If you accept that it’s tradition, if you don’t.
In the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis was at pains to make it easier for people to go to confession.
Yeah.
Plenty of indulgences.
Yes, yes, exactly. He restored faculties to all the priests of the Pius X Society so that they could hear confessions. And he’s extended it since then. He, in the Year of Mercy, Joe will know the correct canonical term here. But he made it so abortions did not have to be absolved by the ordinaries.
There are certain reserved categories of grave sins. And so he made it easier for ordinary priests to forgive the sin of abortion in the confessional, which is great. It’s a great manifestation of mercy. You want to show the severity of the crime, but you also want to make it easy for those who are repentant. And someone in the confessional doesn’t probably need to be reminded of the severity of the crime. They needed to be reminded of the mercy of God. None of that is juxtaposing doctrine with mercy. This is the living out of doctrine.
Right? Yeah. Like confession itself is doctrinal. Like, what’s the point of confession if you don’t believe the doctrine of the Church?
Yeah, right.
Like, why are you going to go to a therapist? Well, I mean, I guess confession’s cheaper. You can save some money that way.
All right, well, here’s Dana Bash over at CNN. Again, I am wholly condemnatory of the reporting. I really do think there was a lot of very kind, considerate and fair reporting. But there are these certain tropes that are interesting. So let’s hear Dana Bash at CNN framing the issue.
His death leaves the world’s more than a billion Catholics without a spiritual shepherd. And it leaves the Church to choose which road it will travel. The same more inclusive one walked by a once-in-a-century pontiff, or the road of tradition and conservatism demanded by his rivals.
Yeah.
Wow, that’s pretty stark.
So this is the kind of thing that I was alluding to at the start of the hour. And it’s this notion that the Church is a political institution, and as a political institution, it has factions within it. Now, there are among the faithful, factions, but this is not Jesus’ desire that there be factions. But the difficulty here is understanding the Church in political terms and not in the terms of an institution founded by Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls, which is what the Church is. And I actually believe that the lady at CNN and most of the media, they just don’t get that. They don’t get it. They’re not aware of it. They haven’t experienced. They have no lived experience, as people like to say today, of, for example, the sacramental mercy of Jesus Christ.
Right, right. And again, this juxtaposition of tradition. In this case, you could be one of those hidebound people who wants tradition, or you could be one of these people that wants openness.
Once in a.
Yeah, and maybe he. Is a once-in-a-century pope. That’s fine if you want to say that. But the tradition of the Church is a tradition of openness to the entire world. That’s not an innovation. That’s an insult to Pope Francis to.
Say that it is. I actually kind of wonder. I think the framing of it has me wondering, like, well, who is the 19th-century Pope Francis in this telling? Maybe the 20th-century one.
Pope Leo. It’s gotta be Pope Leo.
Yeah, we’d be Leo.
Yeah, yeah.
Pius IX maybe.
So Pius IX thought, until he became a tradition.
The first. Yeah, it’s early Pius. The N. I was into him before everyone else was into him. I like the early Pius.
The N or the revolutionaries soured them. Yes.
Yeah. So it would be kind of funny to go back through it and see, like, who would Dana Bash call the once-in-a-century figure in each century. But I think it’s. It is such a bad way of viewing what is going on in the Church because you’re looking at, you know, as Chris said, there can be a political dimension. There can be all of the infighting and all of the less glamorous parts of the faith. But if that’s all you see, that is such a cynical, shallow understanding.
And worse, I guess I would say this. I think the way mainstream media tends to even cover politics is pathetic because it rarely rises to the actual substance or the merits. And it’s just team R and team D and are the red guys going to win or are the blue guys going to win? And it’s a horse trading and it’s all of this stuff without a deep, like, political philosophy, and take that critique, multiply it 10,000 times over for anyone trying to talk about the Catholic Church without bothering to find out, what does the Catholic Church teach? Why is it controversial within the Catholic Church? And most importantly, is it true? You know, wouldn’t it, like, if you’re not trying to do that, then I don’t know what it is you’re trying to do.
It would be fantastic if there were an organization that devoted its energies every day to explaining what the Catholic Church teaches and why she teaches us, even on Easter break.
This is a great idea. And had, for example, a daily radio program where you could call with any question Dana that you have.
Yeah, right.
And, oh, not only that, she did, like, if. And again, CNN. They were very nice to us in the last year. They weren’t mean to us.
They did a nice report on us, but the. Like. We could help you with this. You could ask us how it works in the Church.
I mean, a lot of it isn’t malice, but it is a shocking level of ignorance. You know, if I’ve said this before, but you look at the way they talk about the Eucharist is just the bread and wine, and it would be like if a sports reporter was covering baseball and they called it baskets. It doesn’t matter what else you’ve written. You’ve lost all credibility because you don’t know the basics.
And we would never accept that for sports reporting, but for some reason, we tend to accept it for religious reporting.
I just want to read one thing from the New Yorker magazine because you know that they’re going to be good. Ed Kilgore writing in New Yorker magazine today. But while Francis exhibited the intellectual curiosity characteristic of the Jesuit religious order to which he belonged and emphasized the loving spirit, he bent but did not break doctrinal orthodoxy. Those who hoped he would pave a path to ordination of women, full acceptance of gay and divorced Catholics, an end to clerical celibacy, or a reversal of church teachings on abortion or contraception were regularly disappointed.
I mean, that’s actually a decent take.
It’s true.
Yeah, they were. Why were they thinking there’s a delusional character to liberal Catholicism? And I say liberal, and I really mean heretical or, you know, like the kind of Catholicism that says, maybe next year all these church teachings are gonna go away? And you just say, how many years have they been selling you that? It’s never happened.
But why? Do you ever ask yourself, like, why does the New Yorker magazine care whether the church has clerical celibacy or not? This is something I don’t understand. Why would they see it as progress? If the Catholic Church would say there’s no more celibacy for priests, why do they need to.
I mean, I would offer two explanations. One, there can be a sort of mania among certain secular liberals that any sexual self-control is sexual repression and it’s going to make you do some horrible thing like you’re going to be violent.
And this is completely baseless. That’s not how human personality works.
Yes, exactly. But that leads to, I think the second reason, which is there can be a sort of guilt. You look, I sometimes struggle to diet and when I see someone who’s got their life in order and they do some weird trendy diet, I’m like, give me a break. That can’t work. Even if it looks like it’s clearly working for them, I kind of want it not to be true. That’s not a good part of myself. I’m not bragging about that, but just like, come on, could that really.
And I have to think there’s something similar going on when they’re living lives of sexual brokenness. And here we are doing what to them probably looks like a fad diet of sexual self-control. And then it’s like, oh wait, by every immeasurable.
Yeah, yeah. Catholics are happier than everybody else.
Less out of control.
And this is something they’re really pleased with. And celibacy even works like this. That’s so mind boggling. And so you want to pathologize it so you don’t have to take it seriously.
It’s the compliment that the world pays to the Catholic Church because the world wants her approbation.
Will you both. We started with a Hail Mary prayed for the Holy Father. Would you both join me as we pray our Father for the repose of the soul of our beloved Holy Father, Pope Francis.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.