Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

During the past three weeks or so, I have been approached by a number of Catholics who were upset by the reports they read in the secular media regarding a recent Vatican document.  The reports characterized the document as saying that “The Pope says that Catholics are better than other Christians”.  I knew that this could not be true.  But because there seemed to be so many folks given the same impression by the coverage, as a pastor, I decided to search out the truth. 

The source of the media reports was the issuance of a short document by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.”  On another page of  this week’s bulletin you will find an article from Catholic News Service on this document.   If you’re interested in reading the document itself, it is easily located at Zenit.org, the Vatican News Service website. 

The document clarifies the teaching of the Second Vatican Council which stated that “the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church” (Lumen Gentium) and reaffirms a previous document of the Congregation, Dominus Iesus, issued under the pontificate of John Paul II which taught that the Catholic Church has the “fullness” of the means of salvation.  In other words, the Christian denominations who separated themselves from the Church during the reformation also separated themselves from certain means of Grace, namely, most of the sacraments including the priesthood and apostolic succession.  The document also reaffirmed that salvation is not denied to those outside of the Catholic Church.  Moreover, the document states that the separated denominations “are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation.”  The bottom line is that the coverage of this document in the secular media was, at best, inaccurate.

I learned something during the years I worked as an administrator for the Archdiocese of Chicago.  The mainstream media seldom get their stories about Catholic teaching correct.  One part of the problem is that religion reporters seldom have the background needed to understand the topics on which they report.  I was once interviewed by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who was writing an article on a huge Catholic festival.  Because the reporter was not a Christian, I had to explain the most basic of Christian terms to him.  While it was a moment of evangelization, I thought it was terribly unfair of the newspaper to send this poor fellow to write the article.  It was also unfair to the festival that the coverage was written by someone who couldn’t understand the meaning or significance of the event.  Another piece of the problem about media coverage of the Church is the temptation for the media to make a caricature of church statements for the sake of making an otherwise insignificant article more eye catching or sensational.  Finally (and sadly), there are elements in the media who seem to revel in creating stories about the Catholic Church in order to somehow discredit or mute her voice in the public square for their own purposes.

As Christians, please don’t make the secular media your primary source of information about your Church.  One should also be discriminating about Catholic media outlets who allow their own ideological viewpoints to bias their coverage of Church matters.  Happily, the internet has made access to the original documents and commentaries possible.  If you check the reporter’s sources, you will quickly determine the reliability of that reporter’s work.  Don’t be a victim of what Harry Truman once called “The Big Lie”, that is, something that is repeated long enough and loud enough that people come to accept it as true.

God bless you!

Fr. Joe