As fate would have it, the last two editions of Bondiplus dealt with the papacy. The first was on the death of one pope, the other on the one who stepped into his red leather shoes.
Producing both programmes with the rest of the team we all felt a sense of unease. Getting to grips with a new topic every week, knowing enough to ask reasonably articulate questions and hopefully getting as close as possible to the heart of the matter is always a daunting challenge.
The unrelenting and unforgiving demand of a weekly discussion programme is that you have to grasp matters in a few days which your guests have spent an entire career mulling over. No matter how hard I work at it, I always feel inadequate. Driving home in the middle of the night on Tuesdays after Bondiplus is a dark moment in more than the obvious sense. I blame myself for questions I failed to ask, others I could have put differently and follow-up questions that simply did not occur to me.
Despite my familiarity with this occupational hazard, nothing prepared me for the sensation over the last couple of weeks. Rarely have I ever felt as out of my depth as on the two programmes on the papacy. All the research, all the hours spent comparing the coverage of the international media – television and internet – did little to dispel the persistent feeling that I did not really know what I was talking about. The shroud of mystery gently embracing the Vatican proved to be impenetrable.
I do not think I was alone in this quandary. The intellectual jitteriness also seemed to underpin the round-the-clock television coverage of the international media. Journalists from all over the world stood there with microphone in hand, talking authoritatively about the nitty gritty of papal election rituals. Yet the majestic and slightly out of focus St Peter’s dome towering behind them always looked wiser than they did. The Vatican’s benign yet imperious architectural smirk prevented you from taking the hyperactive journalist or commentator chattering away in its square very seriously. When a CNN anchor asked his correspondent in St Peter’s Square to give him “the score on the ground” you knew that the reportage was going to be miles away from what the cardinals were up to under Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel.
The world’s bewilderment with the workings of a papal election is not accidental. It is a direct result of the abnormal amount of media attention generated by the previous representative of St Peter. Without putting too fine a point on it, for over a quarter of a century, the Vatican did not exist. Only John Paul II did. JPII’s happy marriage with the media was revolutionary. His travels abroad, his undeniable ability to become an event wherever he went and his ineffable capacity to stand by his principles have meant that for two and a half decades, he was the Church, not just its shepherd. His natural charisma and savvy media magnetism, combined with his traditional iron-clad convictions, was the recipe which overshadowed the entire religious set up behind. If JPII was an international superstar pulling millions of people towards him from his centre stage spotlight, the Vatican was his dutiful back-up band, toiling away in shadowy darkness behind him. Who bothers with the bass guitarist or the drummer when the singer makes the crowd swoon with a wave of his hand?
As a result, JPII’s massive personality writ large by the media held a Church together in a way that no one else could. Sure, he had to deal with a wide range of noisy rebellions and events in the Catholic fold spread across the globe – American liberals screaming for the ordination of women and the lifting of the ban on celibacy, sexual abuse of children by priests, South and Central Americans clamouring for more social justice, Africans calling for the lifting of the ban on contraception because of AIDS. Not to mention rapidly declining church attendance and the even more rapidly declining numbers of men joining the priesthood.
None of these issues have been solved and still have to be dealt with. But somehow, JPII always managed to ride over each of them on the strength of his persona. His personality always lifted people’s eyes to the sky, away from the problems on his silver plate. He managed to maintain a media image of a church which appeared to be united in his own person. The way the international media, almost without exception, was completely reverential to his legacy when he died attests to this phenomenon.
Herein lies the challenge, perhaps the problem, awaiting Pope Benedict XVI. The media spotlight pursuing him today is the one whose switch John Paul II lit up. Will the German, the former head of the institutional descendant of the Inquisition, be able to handle the heat of the media spotlight? Will he able to, like his predecessor did, have a media presence which projects an image of unity and harmony despite the absence of both?
Obviously, it is too early to make sensible predictions with confidence. The poor man has just put on his red leather shoes. But the prospects do not look very promising. First of all, it goes without saying that a personality cannot be replicated. And it is monumentally inadvisable to even appear to be trying to do so. What John Paul II had, his magnetism, the awe he inspired in whoever met him was his own, natural, part of his flesh and blood. Secondly, and as a consequence, the absence of such a personality will dissolve the media’s reverence towards the new pope which his predecessor used to enjoy. From now on, the media will be more journalistically aggressive than it has ever been towards the Catholic Church.
Finally, it is not very helpful that Benedict XVI is a conservative in an increasing liberal world. So was John Paul II, but he could get away with it for the reasons given above. As an insightful commentator pointed out, the latter used the instruments of modernity to attack it. The new Pope will have to confront a world which is progressively more hostile to his thinking, even more so than the one his predecessor had to face. And his success will all hinge on the guy he sees in the mirror every morning. If John Paul II lived by the media (even though he gave so much more as a man of God), Benedict XVI will have to constantly avoid death by it.
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