After the election of Pope Leo XIV, liberal reporters cited the brand new Pope’s views, expressed previous to his elevation, as a manner of criticizing the Trump administration. “He represents values which can be completely different than the values on the world stage of the MAGA Trump administration,” former Time managing editor Richard Stengel applauded throughout MSNBC’s dwell protection on Thursday afternoon.
Later that evening, MSNBC All In host Chris Hayes saluted Pope Leo for a worldview “basically at odds with the nationalism of Donald Trump and JD Vance.”
As a matter of rhetorical technique, it’s a manner for anti-Trump journalists to take the inherent ethical authority {that a} Pope represents and use it as a weapon to battle home political battles. However when previous Popes (or even this one) espouse spiritual and ethical views which can be at odds with the secular liberal beliefs of most American journalists, journalists act as if it is the Popes who’re speculated to yield to the media’s superior ethical knowledge.
At the very least that’s the way it performed out in each 2005 and 2013, when Popes Benedict XVI and Francis had been elected. Whereas these two Popes supplied strikingly completely different approaches, American journalists reacted to every Pope’s elevation by complaining about their conventional conservative attitudes whereas lobbying for the Church to “liberalize” on a number of points.
Nearly instantly after Pope John Paul II’s loss of life on April 2, 2005, liberal journalists started labeling his eventual successor as too conservative. “German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger can be talked about, however his excessive conservative views and his age is likely to be his undoing when votes are solid within the Sistine Chapel,” ABC’s Charles Gibson pronounced on the April 4 version of Good Morning America.
On the April 17 NBC Nightly Information, reporter Jim Maceda echoed the standard spin: “Ratzinger nonetheless seems the front-runner, however the ultraconservative Ratzinger, a part of John Paul’s interior circle, could also be damage by information experiences that, as a youngster, he was briefly a member of Hitler’s youth group in Nazi Germany….” Truly, younger Ratzinger had no alternative however to hitch the obligatory group; he later risked loss of life by deserting the Nazi military within the waning weeks of World Warfare II.
“He’s been dubbed ‘God’s Rottweiler,’ a staunch conservative below Pope John Paul, the enforcer of orthodoxy,” ABC’s David Wright equally declared April 18 on Good Morning America, the day the cardinals started their conclave.
The following day (April 19), the networks had a predictably bitter response to Ratzinger’s election. From the brand new pontiff’s native Germany, “there’s widespread doubt right here that he’ll be capable to overcome his fame because the intimidating enforcer, punishing liberal thinkers and retaining the Church within the Center Ages,” ABC Information producer Christel Kucharz reported by phone quickly after the announcement.
“That is a particularly controversial alternative,” ABC’s Cokie Roberts harrumphed throughout dwell protection that afternoon. “This can be a alternative of the one that is seen by the world as essentially the most conservative voice of Catholicism, and whether or not his papacy provides the misinform that or not, we’ve no manner of realizing.”
“He has taken the identify of a healer, however the place will this archconservative lead the Catholic Church?” correspondent Mark Phillips puzzled just a few hours afterward the CBS Night Information.
Over on FNC’s Particular Report with Brit Hume, Roll Name’s Mort Kondracke painted the brand new Pope in darkish phrases. “He [Cardinal Ratzinger] stated in his homily, on the loss of life of Pope John Paul, that the world faces the menace of a dictatorship of relativism. And what he appears to signify is a dictatorship of certitude. I imply, one in all his biographers stated that he wished to battle political totalitarianism on the planet with ecclesiastical totalitarianism.”
The following morning on CBS’s Early Present, reporter Sheila MacVicar supplied unfavorable response from Germany: “This Pope’s rigorous fundamentalism worries many right here.” On the identical program, her colleague John Roberts famous how “many Catholics…discovered nothing to rejoice. His election would seem to sprint reformers’ hopes that the Vatican would strike out in a brand new course after the conservative reign of John Paul II.”
And on NBC’s Right now, the brand new Pope was branded as “hardline,” “exhausting edge,” and a “staunch conservative.” Reporter Keith Miller painted Benedict as uncompromising: “An instinctive conservative, he was dubbed ‘The Enforcer,’ sustaining a convincing no to the ordination of ladies, divorce and contraception.”
Eight years later, Benedict’s retirement on the age of 85 meant one other conclave to pick out his alternative. “Many Catholics are hoping a brand new pope could also be an opportunity to rethink previous doctrines, together with one of many oldest and, in right now’s Church, now probably the most controversial: celibacy,” CBS’s Barry Petersen lobbied March 10, 2013 on Sunday Morning.
The election of Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis on March 13, 2013 was met with surprisingly related criticism as confronted the brand new Pope Benedict eight years earlier. Whereas awaiting the official announcement, CNN’s Miguel Marquez opined that Catholics all over the world “hope for a extra open, clear, liberal, progressive church,” and handed his microphone to an American lady in St. Peter’s Sq..
“We’re very nervous,” she informed CNN, “as a result of we presume {that a} fast vote implies that it’s going to be somebody that’s well-known throughout the Curia, and the boys, the cardinals which can be very well-known and established in Rome and the Curia are not very pleasant in direction of ladies and so they’re extra traditionalists. So we’re somewhat bit nervous proper now….”
On that evening’s CBS Night Information, correspondent Allen Pizzey knowledgeable viewers that the brand new Pope Francis is a “conservative…[who] opposes abortion, helps celibacy, and known as homosexual adoption discrimination in opposition to youngsters.”
Over on CNN, then-host Piers Morgan faulted the brand new Pope for failing as an advocate for homosexual rights in Argentina. “He has been having this ongoing battle together with his personal Argentinean president, who can be a Catholic, however she has been very forceful in pushing ahead homosexual marriage, synthetic insemination, free contraception, and so forth, clashing with him repeatedly,” Morgan declared. He fretted: “In case you are homosexual, and also you need to be Catholic, for the time being, you’re principally demonized….Successive popes haven’t moved with the occasions in a manner that many Catholics, and I might be a kind of, want that that they had.”
“Pope Francis’s conservative views on contraception, homosexuality, and ladies’s rights haven’t made him well-liked with comparatively progressive Jesuit brothers,” correspondent Mark Phillips echoed on CBS This Morning the subsequent day (March 14).
Over on NBC, Right now co-host Matt Lauer sounded a dismissive word, telling New York Metropolis’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan: “Once you checked out that picture of the brand new Pope standing with some members of the Church hierarchy, visually, Cardinal Dolan, it didn’t precisely scream a contemporary Church.”
That morning’s New York Instances additionally solid the brand new Pope as a carbon copy of his predecessors. “Cardinal Bergoglio can be a traditional alternative, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, homosexual marriage, the ordination of ladies and different main points — resulting in heated clashes with Argentina’s left-leaning president,” wrote the Instances’s Emily Schmall and Larry Rohter.
And 24 hours after Francis’s election, ABC Information correspondent Terry Moran agreed that the brand new Pope was each bit as Catholic as those that got here earlier than him: “It seems, on many points, Pope Francis is a staunch traditionalist. He in contrast abortion to a loss of life sentence; known as homosexual marriage ‘harmful of God’s plan.’”
Over time, many within the media got here to admire Pope Francis, particularly for his blunt criticisms of the Trump administration, although they by no means warmed to Pope Benedict. What’s apparent, although, is that journalists finally demand that Popes measure as much as the media’s personal secular liberal yardstick.
For extra examples from our flashback sequence, which we name the NewsBusters Time Machine, go right here.
