Peter, the man of Assisi, the evangelist of India, and a bishop from Argentina: those are the figures we, but not our opinionators, see before us on this day

Press Ignorance Points to Deeper Problems

by Anthony Esolen

In The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman writes, 

“Men whose minds are possessed with some one object, 

take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, 

and are startled and despond if it happens to fail them. 

 They are ever in alarm or transport.”

I write these words a few days or hours or minutes before the crier at the Vatican will call out to the faithful gathering in the piazza below, Annuntio vobis gaudeam magnam! Habemus papam! The spiritual man judges all things, says Saint Paul, but cannot be judged rightly by the world, because the world’s vision is too narrow; the world, granting it all the good will we may, will simply not grasp the essence of what it seeks to judge. We have seen evidence of Saint Paul’s assertion in the last few weeks. Reporters for the media mundi see all things in the light of the politics of celebrity. They make it the measure of the Church, which is in her essence utterly foreign to that pagan cult—one well known to the master propagandist Augustus Caesar, whom Jesus may have had in mind when he observed, dryly, that the rulers of the pagans lord it over them, and have themselves called “benefactors” into the bargain. “But it shall not be so among you,” he warns his apostles.

Many Catholic writers have remarked on the obtuseness of the media mundi—on the teary-eyed secular advisors warning us that the Church must get with the times (evidently The New York Times), taking up Doctor Freud’s Moral Elixir, or she will go on coughing and sputtering to death; as if the Church had not long buried Dr. Freud, and Mr. Hume, and Professor Kant, and Emperor Napoleon, and the humane favorite of well-heeled and citified laymen Arius, and Viking raiders and Madame Blavatsky and apostate nuns and gold-hungry conquistadores and Manicheans addled by sexual license or by celibacy or by each in turn. “You’d best come to terms with the authorities, Cephas,” says the reporter for the Roman Tribune, “or you’ll end up suffering just as your Master did, and then what will happen to your Church? I have only your good in mind.”

But I believe we are encountering something both more pardonable

 and more problematic than mere ignorance of the Church. 

 We are encountering a broad and deep ignorance generally. 

 Newman had in his sights the quackery of his day, hawked by political economists of the school of Jeremy Bentham, and given institutional potency by the new University of London, a school wherein theology was neither to be preached nor decried, but simply ignored. Bentham the liberal was the perfect type of the illiberal mind, as he cramped the human world into the formulae of the one object of his pursuit, political economy. Yet Bentham still had something of an education. Adam Smith may have been a questionable moral philosopher, but nobody would accuse him of being ill-read. Ernest Renan read the gospels wrong-side-out, but he did read them.

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