KEY POINTS:
It wouldn't be Easter without some sort of anti-Christian rhetoric.
This year, like clockwork, the mainstream media have managed to misunderstand or at least misreport the musings of Italian bishop Gianfranco Girotti.
Let's start at the beginning, with the Herald deciding, like hundreds of other newspapers, to grossly misrepresent what a lone bishop said in an interview with the Vatican's newspaper.
We'll concede "Bishop encourages people to avoid 21st-century transgressions" isn't as sexy a headline as "Vatican introduces new deadly sins". To paraphrase a famous saying, don't let the facts get in the way of a good headline.
And don't let the fact it was that lone bishop speaking stop the Herald from running a photo of Pope Benedict on the front page and then repeating the dose the next day, by which time one might have thought its editors would have realised the errors they had made tying the comments to the Pope, the Vatican or the Catholic Church as a whole.
If certain publications want to make such erroneous connections, that's their prerogative. We'll be interested to see how the Prime Minister reacts when comments a backbench MP makes to his or her local newspaper are reported as new Labour policy and run with Helen Clark's photo.
Or the thoughts of one imam being presented as the ideas of all Muslim leaders.
As someone wrote on a blog recently, the mainstream media have become far more interested in religion since 9/11 and the proliferation of suicide bombings. Unfortunately, the journalists haven't become any more informed about religion.
Saturday's edition of the Herald picked the story up again, with two columnists and the paper's editorial writers all deeming it worthy of their attention. With 72 hours or more since the story first surfaced, one might have hoped at least one of the three articles would redress the earlier errors.
No such luck. They all continued the inaccuracies in one form or another. A few stick out as especially worthy of correction.
The editorial didn't disappoint when it trotted out the wealth card. The church is in an awkward position when it comes to criticising obscene wealth, the editorial argues, because of the Vatican and its treasures.
Last time we checked, church officials weren't sneaking into Sotheby's to buy some more priceless artefacts. Cardinals and bishops don't think, "Hmmm, let's buy a Picasso this week and let the poor go hungry and the homeless sleep outside tonight". In fact, the public, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, are able to view most of those treasures free of charge.
And, contrary to what Bill Ralston suggested - mostly tongue in cheek, we suspect - on radio last week, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett aren't necessarily resigned to an abode in hell once their earthly journey is over. Accumulating wealth, in and of itself, is not sinful. It becomes sinful when one hordes that wealth and doesn't use it to help those less fortunate than them.
Paul Thomas picks up the baton with another oft-used argument: the church aided and abetted Hitler. In Thomas' footsteps, we'll recommend a book but certainly not the same one he did.
Try The Myth of Hitler's Pope, written by a rabbi, explaining how Pope Pius XII saved thousands upon thousands of Jews in World War II, even housing some at the papal summer residence near Rome.
As a reviewer of the book writes: "The mainstream media, which has gone out of its way to showcase condemnations of this great pope while ignoring cogent and persuasive defences, would be left gasping in shock, scarcely knowing how to react."
A long list of people has taken the bait on this topic. Thomas has also completely misunderstood or at least mischievously commented on the notion of papal infallibility. A quick Google search would have told you election to the papacy doesn't make a cleric infallible but it's a good scaremongering tactic to suggest that.
Noelle McCarthy, not to be outdone, suggests among countless other arguable comments the church arrived late to the environmental cause.
By our calculations, the book of Genesis was written quite some time before Al Gore and others started their worthy efforts to follow God's call in Genesis to care for the planet.
Possibly the most disappointing part of all the coverage was the lack of rational follow-up to this story. To my knowledge, no Catholic leaders, other than the translated words of Bishop Girotti, have been consulted in this entire process. The thoughts of Joe Public, and probably none of them Catholic, were deemed suitable for your page 2 material the day after the story broke, but comment from the church was not run and maybe not sought.
It's a real shame the coverage has been so poor, because the new seven social sins, the number of which apparently made it too enticing to avoid naming them deadly, were ones that people should have applauded.
Sure, some people would take exception to the bishop's take on genetic modification or human experimentation. But who doesn't want to stop the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer, or wipe out social injustice - something the church has been trying to do for centuries?
And while many despise the word "sin", because it involves the admission of doing something wrong, they would not be afraid to condemn actions that pollute the environment beyond what would be deemed reasonable by society.
In an individualistic world, it's even harder to stop and think about how what each of us does can affect other often large groups of people.
Many, many people have lost their moral compass and every person suffers from lapses from time to time. Heck, Pope John Paul II went to confession weekly, if not more frequently.
If this media hatchet job does nothing other than remind people of the seven capital or deadly sins and makes one person stop and think before acting in an immoral way, then something good might come from it. If so, the mainstream media won't be able to take any credit for it.
* The Most Rev Patrick Dunn is the Catholic Bishop of Auckland. Gavin Abraham is the managing editor of NZ Catholic, the national Catholic newspaper published by the diocese of Auckland.
