Those attempting to expose this agenda are being censored and accused of defending the indefensible
I HAD an odd feeling last Friday morning, listening to an RTÉ apology broadcast on Morning Ireland.We don't think of published apologies as journalism, but this went to the heart of matters the Irish media refuses point-blank to ventilate. Something was being "reported" that generally remains unacknowledged.
The apology stated that, on May 23rd last, RTÉ broadcast a Prime Timeprogramme "A Mission to Prey", which accused Fr Kevin Reynolds, parish priest at Ahascragh, Galway, of raping a minor while a missionary in Kenya and fathering a child as a result.
Before the broadcast, Fr Reynolds had made repeated but fruitless efforts to alert the Prime Timejournalists to the falsity of the allegations, even offering to undergo a paternity test. RTÉ's apology acknowledged that the programme should not have been broadcast and said it "fully and unreservedly" accepted that Fr Reynolds was "entirely innocent", that the allegations were "baseless, without any foundation whatever and untrue".
The apology could hardly be more explicit in its admission of error, but, had he not been able definitively to demonstrate his innocence with a paternity test, the programme would have cast Fr Reynolds forever among the growing legions of discredited Catholic clerics.
The allegations seemed of a piece with the broader picture, sketched out over several years in Irish media, of predatory priests abusing their power and positions. The “victims” had spoken out, and victims, as we know, are always to be believed. The priest denied it, but he would, wouldn’t he?
This goes beyond slackness. There was no apology for the title of the programme: “A Mission to Prey”. Here, the allegations against Fr Reynolds acquired an added dimension of toxicity, imputing to him and implicitly to other Catholic missionaries an abominable premeditation.
Behind the priestly vocation and outward altruism of church initiatives in foreign countries, that title insinuated, is a grotesque design to abuse and exploit. The title echoes a malevolent mentality now rampant in the Irish media, which, where the church is concerned, no longer considers it enough to state facts – the case must be augmented with sneers and vicious innuendos.
Carefully nurtured public prejudice ensures that, when condemning a church figure, it’s impossible to go too far.
It goes deeper than one bad story. There is now a venomous culture in the Irish media directed at faith in general and Catholicism in particular. For some years, anyone suggesting that coverage of clerical sex abuse scandals was concealing a deeper antipathy towards Catholicism has been silenced by journalists insisting they were only doing their jobs.
These shushings were invariably followed by tautological lists of the wrongs of the church, as though past findings prove all present and future charges. Anyone seeking to refer to the background radiation, to adduce evidence of media bias and hostility toward the church that went beyond the call of journalistic duty or the remit of the public interest, was dismissed as an “apologist” or worse.
The language and assumptions pertaining to virtually all media treatment of such matters are generally so tendentious as to preclude any possibility of fairness or truth. Contrary to the standard protestations, this is not just a matter of an adversarial ethic that for the moment happens for good reasons to be on the church’s case.
Under cover of the legitimate requirement to expose wrongdoing by church figures resides a vicious demeanour of hostility and dismissiveness towards Catholicism, which it is impossible to challenge without being accused of defending the indefensible.
There is a deeper issue. Tuning in to what purport to be discussions about Catholicism on radio or television has become a surreal experience accompanied by this odd sense that, sometime in the recent past, it has been communally agreed that religious belief is all merely dangerous hokum, recently superseded by advancing “knowledge” and “understandings”.
Thus, although most of the population still lays formal claim to a Catholic identity, anti-Catholic positions and an irreligious sense of how the great questions confronting mankind are to be addressed appear to have been adopted by journalists without consultation or discussion. Catholicism and its perspectives are unworthy of consideration.
Before our eyes, under cover of the clerical abuse issue, Irish society is being remade and by osmosis a new reality is being fashioned, undemocratically, aggressively and with a total indifference to facts or truth. Contempt for Catholicism, and the demonisation and censorship of those who draw attention to this syndrome, have enabled a process of creeping de-absolutisation, now gradually supplanting the core content of our culture.