From the editor’s desk

A legitimate right to debate

The arrival of Dr Joaqu?n Navarro-Valls as head of the Vatican press office 22 years ago signalled a change in the attitude to the press at the headquarters of the Catholic Church. As a former journalist, indeed the Vatican correspondent of a leading Spanish newspaper, he was aware of the needs of his former colleagues and the shortcomings of the service they relied on. Although his was always a modest and understated performance, Dr Navarro-Valls was largely responsible for the media projection of Pope John Paul II as the international superstar he became. Now he is being replaced by Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, the head of Vatican radio and television. This may mark a change of emphasis from presentation to dissemination. Pope Benedict XVI does not seem concerned with stardom, but is still profoundly interested in ideas.

It is in the area of ideas that the Church has some way to go before it responds adequately to the phenomenon of the modern mass media. Success has eluded various attempts to draw up a theological understanding of the relationship, starting with the unsatisfactory Vatican II decree Inter Mirifica. This may partly be because the issues were studied in isolation, as a relationship between two disparate interests. Most people, in the West at least, receive most of their information about the internal affairs of the Church from the media, and not directly from official Church sources. That suggests that part of the necessary spiritual lifeblood that keeps the Church alive circulates through vessels the official Church cannot control.

This is a theologically significant form of participation - almost wholly lay, it needs to be said - that is rarely recognised as such. What is lacking is the understanding J.H. Newman brought to his essay "On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine", which began with the mundane issue of whether a Catholic schoolmaster had a right to express an opinion on whether Government school inspectors should be allowed to inspect Catholic schools. In the course of it, Newman argued that the very orthodoxy of the Church had sometimes been saved by the sensus fidelium - the man or woman in the street, as it were, or at least in the pew - when it was being betrayed by the hierarchy.

In the modern world, this tension between sensus fidelium and hierarchy is often worked out in and through the mass media. But this role is often seen from above as improper, an unacceptable challenge to power. That is why the mass media are rarely given enough information to do their job properly, such as the ability to debate all options before decisions are made.

The Church has yet to recognise a "right to know" among the ordinary clergy and laity. The recent process of revising the liturgy in English was the most notorious example of this lack of openness.

The attempt to suppress popular debate on issues that are clearly still unresolved, ranging from contraception to the place of women in the Church, is to indicate that the media has no legitimate right to report information and argument. It is a disenfranchisement of the laos, the people of God, that can lead to frustration, infantilism, anomie or apathy. Newman, needless to say, would be disappointed.