The first part of this paper presents the Church before the court of public opinion through a synthesis of the findings of research about media coverage of the Catholic Church in the last 20 years. Public opinion exists within the Church, although it is not called this because the Church is not a political or a democratic community. However, since it is a communion, it necessarily requires communication. All communication brings with it debate, which in the case of the Church is a kind of singular 'public opinion.' This is manifested in diverse ways depending on the issue concerned. In this study, I have chosen a threefold division of public opinion within the Church for analytical purposes, for in reality the different aspects occur together. First, when the matter is concerned with the demands of the faith, 'public opinion' is called sensus fidelium and behavesor should behaveas one would expect in regards to dogma or doctrine and its demands for communion in the faith. Second, when it is concerned with questions of the government, which affect the good of the communion, the hierarchical principal rulesor should rule -, that is to say the demands of communion. Third, when public opinion is concerned with contingent questions, we areor we ought to bein the area of free debate and opinion, in the area of disagreement, which supposes and requires both freedom and plurality. Developing this central idea is the objective of the second and third part of the article, after having presented synthetically the teachings about the subject of the Catholic Church and of the popes from Pius XII to John Paul II, and especially of pope Francis. In the third part, these ideas are applied to the cases of the sex abuse scandal, which are in the course of being resolved since the measures of Benedict XIV. The underlying thesis is that the problem was a practical ecclesiological error, not merely an error in communication. The study concludes with five recommendations for those in charge of ecclesiastical communication.
Objectivity weakly revisited' could be the synthesis of this huge effort to rehabilitate objectivity; an effort made by Steven Maras, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Sidney on 2013, a very few years before the now almost burned-out debate on fake news and post-truth had ignited. The book has been published in the collection of 'Key Concepts in Journalism' of Polity Press, a well-known publisher of valuable and critical books regarding journalistic and media issues. The structure of Maras' book is very clear, especially in its first part. I will summarize it briefly: It opens with the history of objectivity as a journalistic paradigm and/or ethical rule, until it was attacked and rejected in the 90sfor example, by Mindich in 1998and later on (Chapter 1). Then, in Chapter 2, the author presents the main objections to the notion of objectivity, objections well-articulated and displayed in an apparently irrefutable way. In Chapter 3, the author goes into to the philosophical sources of the debate, that is to the diverse epistemologies underlying the contrasting versions of the problem and their correlative answers: the model of correspondence and coherence, empiricism, positivism, pragmatism, realism, naturalism and postmodernism. Although Maras' book is not a book on the history of epistemology, his account is good enough … for the theories of knowledge of the Enlightenment. This is, in my view, the main objection to the book, as it is the missing point of any Modern attempt to establish a sound basis for connecting journalists' work with the world outside, if those attempts want to avoid arbitrarily falling into limitless subjective points of view, or even into more limited overarching 'narratives', or on the other hand to giving up to the changeable consensual truth imposed by the tyranny of the majority. Maras goes back no further than the Enlightenment. Moreover, he even forgets to present the origin of the fact/value divide: it was Hume's epistemology, whose defining division is between isjudgments and ought-judgments that shaped the terms of the debate from then on. Needless to say, the great father of the Modern objective-subjective epistemological breakfor there are other pre-Modern versions of the break, such as medieval nominalism against realism-is also missing: Descartes, whose cogito ergo sum is the turning point in the Copernican revolution in the theory of knowledge of Modern times. Chapter 4 offers the grounds on which objectivity has been defended, poorly defended as the title clearly shows: 'has been defended'. The chapter mirrors the previous one and echoes also the very same deficiencies. In my view, the conclusion of this chapter could have also been the conclusion of the book: 'What is evident [this is after his account of the arguments in favor of objectivity, arguments whose effectiveness the author does not measure] is that any simple dismissal of objectivity as impossible has been complicated. Objectivity needs not to be tied to an idea of a reality that exi...
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