Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on how the media are covering Catholicism:
Last week, Pope Francis commented on problems at the U.S. border. “During the Obama years I celebrated Mass at Ciudad Juárez, while on the other side of the border 50 bishops concelebrated, and in the stadium there were many people. The problem already existed there. It’s not just an issue with Trump, but goes back to prior governments.”
Why wasn’t this headline news? If the pope had unfavorably compared President Trump to President Obama it would have been. Thanks to Thomas D. Williams and Carl E. Olson, two astute Catholic journalists, we know about it.
Earlier last week, I pointed out that the pope made it clear that gay couples are not a family. “It is painful for me to say this today: People speak of varied families, of various kinds of family,” but “the family [as] man and woman in the image of God is the only one.”
Why wasn’t this headline news? The media clearly have no interest in informing the public of the pope’s traditional views on marriage and the family—that would interfere with their carefully contrived narrative of who he is.
So what made headline news this week? A priest from Kenya has been suspended for rapping during Mass. ABC, BBC, CNN, Fox News, Newsweek, and other outlets covered this story (in fairness to CNN, it also carried the story on the pope and gay couples).
The rapping priest story, whatever one thinks about the suspension, is purely an internal Church issue, having no public role whatsoever. But when the head of the Church addresses how the president and his predecessor have dealt with the issue of immigration, that is a very public issue. Ditto for when the pope says something controversial about gays and the family.
All of this is deliberate. The media barons inflate and deflate issues that reflect their ideological predilections. That they don’t see this as a problem is the most disturbing aspect of it all.
