By Victoria Guida
Our two-week trip was a whirlwind of beautiful buildings, fun outings and media visits. Translation: an amazing experience for a journalism nerd who loves to travel. I learned some new words — “pain” means bread in French and doesn’t sound at all like our less pleasant word of the same spelling. I ate some new food — like goulash, Fidorka (look it up on Wikipedia) and those tasty, actually Belgian, waffles. But I also got to experience firsthand how Europeans cover the news.
 |
| St. Peter's Basilica. |
During our visit to the school of communications at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, I was intrigued by David Kerr’s take on coverage of the Vatican. Kerr, a friendly Scottish man who reports for Catholic News Agency, said that while Vatican correspondents shouldn’t just produce propaganda for the Catholic Church, other news outlets often present the Church unfair.
This is interesting to me because the Church is an entity based around a religion with which people either agree or disagree based on deeply held beliefs. The Church’s positions on any topic would be expected to come back to, “It’s what Jesus would want,” and that’s something that’s based more on faith than on reasoning. But it’s not like the Church doesn’t use reasoning, and maybe that’s something that is often overlooked. For example, the Church doesn’t continue to condemn the use of contraception because it has ignored the benefits of using it, but because it decided a long time ago that humans should not interfere with the natural process of producing children; a position that still holds no matter the perceived benefits of contraception.
It’s moral decisions like this that could make covering the Church more complicated in a modern world. Is it okay for the secular world to condemn the Church for a position it sees as harmful to the future of the world? I suppose the answer should be: as long as the Church’s position is properly explained. Kerr seems to believe that too often this does not happen, and I decided to see whether he’s right.
