The MSM Unclear on the Concept of the Pope & Church

“Enter through the nar­row gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruc­tion, and those who enter through it are many. How nar­row the gate and con­stricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.” Matthew 7:13 – 14

Dur­ing her ini­tial post on the sub­ject of the Pope’s upcom­ing res­ig­na­tion Eliz­a­beth Scalia put up an update say­ing the fol­low­ing:

I’m kind of appalled at how some mem­bers of the press are react­ing to this. The announce­ment wasn’t two hours old when the cable news gas­bags started in with their “wish list” and express­ing hopes that the next pope “gets it right” on the “impor­tant issues.” A few sound like they’re all but cross­ing a line through this pon­tif­i­cate with zero under­stand­ing or appre­ci­a­tion of what it has actu­ally been.

That evening was even worse, All the MSM net­works focused on dis­si­dents and CNN gave dis­si­dents cen­ter stage although they have as much cred­i­bil­ity and influ­ence as the Lyn­don LaRouche cam­paign has on Amer­i­can elec­tions. Unlike the LaRou­ch­ites the Catholic dis­si­dents’ agenda is the MSM agenda, there­fore when­ever the oppor­tu­nity arises they’ll give them a push so they can pay for the fax machine and letterhead

Note she says she’s appalled, not sur­prised. Nei­ther am I.

At noon on Mon­day I watched Alex Wag­ner, EJ Dionne and Jonathan Cape­hart fan­ta­size about the church going lib­eral but there was one sin­gle voice of pseudo real­ity in the mix, Chris Matthews.

While Matthews was just as desir­ing the church to aban­don Catholic belief he was real­is­tic enough to throw water on the idea there is: “any big lib­eral out there” who can get win the vote, but he is still talk­ing about this entire process as if it’s a precinct elec­tion in Brooklyn.

The truth is to many on the left and a few on the right Chris­tian­ity in gen­eral and the Catholic Church in par­tic­u­lar is a prob­lem to be solved, not a faith to be under­stood or explained and cer­tainly not to be embraced as it.

Let me take a moment to edu­cate a media igno­rant of the Church’s mis­sion and those who depend on this unin­formed group for their info on the Catholic Church.

The Church has a sin­gle pur­pose, a sin­gle mis­sion a sin­gle task that is the source for all it does: It exists to bring souls to Christ and save them from Damna­tion. This is the task of every per­son in the church from the low­est novice to the Pope. The Holy Father’s task more­over as leader of the Catholic Church is to facil­i­tate this task on a world­wide scale.

It’s that simple.

As Christ him­self has told us, this task is dif­fi­cult, like hit­ting a base­ball the best will fail far more times than they suc­ceed. In fact not only does the job descrip­tion say the world will resist you, friends will become foes. It will make you hated as Christ him­self said:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daugh­ter against her mother, and a daughter-​in-​law against her mother-​in-​law; and one’s ene­mies will be those of his house­hold.  Matt 10:34 – 36

What’s more that task trumps all other deeds, and works. If you are a reli­gious and the focus of what you are doing is not to bring some­one to Christ, you’re doing it wrong. Once your min­istry no mat­ter what it is becomes about you and YOUR cause and not about Christ’s cause, you not only fail to save oth­ers but you put your­self at risk.

If you want to under­stand the Church, its mag­is­terium, the scrip­tures, or why the Pope does what he does, under­stand that mes­sage first.

Any­thing else is just noise.

Update: Ed Mor­ris­sey expands on the subject:

Much of the report­ing, how­ever, is as non­sen­si­cal as Hugh describes, either out of igno­rance or some­thing worse. Part of it, though, comes from the nar­row con­texts in which work and ana­lyze the news, espe­cially through the prism of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. That pro­duces “analy­sis” which in this case would have read­ers and view­ers believe that the Church changes doc­trine with each Pope, an absur­dity that will end up back­fir­ing when the next Pope is just as Catholic as Bene­dict XVI and every one of his predecessors.

As every sin­gle Car­di­nal who is vot­ing for the next Pope was appointed by either John Paul II or Bene­dict XVI the folks like the nude pro­test­ers who think the Church is going to sud­denly decide to throw out that whole Bible have the same odds of being right as I do of get­ting a sud­den invi­ta­tion to sit next to the First Lady at the SOTU speech tonight.

Update 2: The Tele­graph gets it:

Robert Mick­ens, Vat­i­can cor­re­spon­dent for The Tablet, said: “These are uncharted waters, we have never had an elec­tion in which a for­mer pope was still alive.

“By resign­ing he has assured that he can have an influ­ence on who becomes his suc­ces­sor. One of his guys is prob­a­bly going to be elected Pope.

“It will be psy­cho­log­i­cally dif­fi­cult for the car­di­nals to vote for some­one who wants to take the Church in a very dif­fer­ent direc­tion than Benedict.

That’s a very good point.