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Viewpoint: Challenge media trivialization of Pope Francis' radical message


The recent national conference of the Religion Newswriters Association in Philadelphia focused on preparing the several hundred media attendees for how to cover the Pope's visit to the US this week, Rabbi Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun. But in panel after panel, we were presented with leaders of the Catholic Church who were unsympathetic to the Pope's message. Too smart to directly critique the Pope, in session after session they presented a single message: the "real story" about Pope Francis is what a great guy he is, how caring he is personally for the poor and the downtrodden. The Pope, they insisted, has no politics--he's above politics and only a humble servant of Jesus.

Apparently the right-wingers in the Church hope that the media doesn't know that Jesus himself was a revolutionary with a powerful call to challenge the way official Judaism at that time, represented by the priests of the Temple, had become assimilated to the values of the Roman occupiers of Judea rather than articulators of the prophetic message of the Torah to "love the stranger" and pursue justice and caring for all. And for an America's corporate media, which often obscures the environmental destructiveness and human suffering that global capitalism has wrought for the contemporary world, the path to turn attention away from the Pope's critique of capitalism is to lionize him in precisely the trivializing way that his detractors in the Church recommend.


To read on see: www.tikkun.org/nextgen/challenge-the-media-trivialization-of-the-popes-radical-message

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