Pope Leo has been Pope for over three months. And still, I really know nothing about him and his career up until now.
There was a flurry of attention regarding his choices on his first appearance: what he wore, the languages he used, what he said, and so forth. This despite the fact that the initial appearance of a new Pope is highly ceremonial and stylized.
Since then, very little.
Robert Prevost has been a public figure for decades now. Surely he made innumerable speeches, wrote innumerable articles, and met innumerable people in that time. All I really know about him is that he's a fan of the Chicago White Sox.
I'm not suggesting there's any agenda behind this. It's just really strange. Think of the legions of journalists, bloggers, YouTube channels, academics, and so forth who would supposedly take an interest in this.
Last year I read a good chunk of Austin Ivereigh's biography of Pope Francis, The Great Reformer. Turns out Josemaria Bergoglio was a very interesting guy long before he became Pope. I didn't know the half of it-- I didn't know a hundredth of it. Even though he had been Pope for more than a decade and I follow the Catholic media.
And this doesn't just apply to papal life stories. I've encountered this strange phenomenon over and over-- that only a small smattering of facts about any given subject ever seem to enter the public realm, the public consciousness.
I've noticed it too. It is a repeated pattern, and thus not an accident. It's an aspect of the media being about manipulation, not information.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, this goes as far as not even *asking* relevant questions and squashing anyone who does... until it is "too late to matter" and everyone has lost interest.
I saw this most obviously in relation to Obama - about whom almost nothing was known by the electorate when he became President.
What little *was* known was hidden (such as that he wrote in his own book biography that he had been born in Kenya thus ineligible to be President of the USA, such as that he was a promoted professor in the University of Chicago despite never publishing a single paper), the very strange and suspicious aspects of his biography were not discussed; and nobody asked (or was allowed to ask) any more.
Then he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, before he even took office! (Presumably on the basis of electoral pledges that he never kept but flagrantly broke in the following eight years.)
Again and again the public are induced to buy a pig in a poke, by those who often know perfectly well what is inside the bag.
I hadn't linked it with Obama, but that's very true. He really did come out of nowhere. And I'll admit I was a bit sceptical of your claim about the biography, but here it is! Their claim is that it was just a typo.
ReplyDeletehttps://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/born-kenya-obamas-literary-agent-misidentified-birthplace-1991/story?id=16372566
I've never delved into those controversies myself, so I don't have any stance on them either way. But the general point seems very true.
all i need to know is he opposed jd vance on the ordo amoris and is pro immigrant scum
ReplyDeleteThe media has an agenda. It is like the current barrage of stories about the Irish mother homes. They forget to mention that in the 1950s most countries had similar homes. While it is possible that the Irish version was worse (although Austria's seem pretty bad, including psychological experimentation on the children), I haven't seen that argument made. Instead the argument seems to go, "these were bad and were run by the Catholic Church and so the church is bad." The conclusion doesn't follow, especially if it wasn't a Catholic country only thing. Even in the US single mothers were pressured into giving their babies up for adoption in similar situations.
ReplyDeleteThat's very true. Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne made a good video about it recently. (At least, about the specific case of Tuam.)
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OczjrIhzgDg
The thing is, though, that this weird lack of detail seems to obtain even where there's no obvious agenda at play. At least, I've found this to be the case.