[First published in ‘AM New York’]
POPE BENEDICT XVI is enjoying quite a media honeymoon. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was such a severe disciplinarian, and his guarding of Church orthodoxy so steely, that he was nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” and “the Panzer Cardinal“. But he’s now a darling of the press.
Professor Robert Scott Appleby from America’s bestknown Catholic university, Notre Dame, has assessed the Pope’s press treatment: “I am not saying that he has been given a pass, but some appropriate deference has been shown.”
It began with the Vatican parading cardinals for an unusual spectacle: successive mini-press conferences, extolling Benedict’s previously unappreciated qualities, like his gentleness and shyness. Then his own brother, also a priest, was made available to reporters, painting sweet pictures of the hard-liner as an absentminded professor repeatedly mislaying his eye-glasses.
It’s just too squirm-making to quote the most gushing coverage.
All this, however, hasn’t made a completely successful impression in his own home country. Despite his papal pallium, the symbolic shepherd’s shawl, the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung bluntly summed up the new Pope as a ”wolf among sheep“.
THE STRATEGY BEHIND a ‘charm offensive’ for any leader is of course to beef up his following. An under-reported new study serves to question the real impact of all the undoubted charm projected by Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II – especially (perhaps surprisingly) among the young.
The survey, from Oxford University Press and called “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers,” will give some pause to anyone who remembers the World Youth Day in Denver, when John Paul received a rock-star reception from hundreds of thousands of young people.
More image than substance, perhaps. The study devotes a special chapter to adolescent Catholics. According to the pollsters, they “stand out among U.S. Christian teenagers as consistently scoring lower” on scales of actual practice and belief – by a margin of 5 to 25% compared with other denominations.
The Catholic Church’s next generation, the 18-34 age-group that every mass marketer always wants to reach, is proving increasingly unreachable.
Tellingly, it was the new Pope who often said, before his elevation, that the Church may have to get smaller, if purer – become, indeed, what he called a “creative minority“.
IT’S NOT AS IF the media can claim any greater youth-outreach than the Church. The Carnegie Corporation‘s latest survey, “Abandoning the News”, shows that among 18-34-year-olds merely 19% now read a newspaper daily.
Curiously, though, another new report (by the Pew Center) that it’s this demo that finds the media more believable. Older audiences are the cynical ones, if appears.
All in all, I’m grateful that most Media Beat readers (57%) are between 18 and 34.
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