Indeed, his use of a blog to spread the Gospel earned Dowd the nickname “The Blogfather.” Never mind that Ottawa’s Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, who has not been 40 for several years, has blogged just as eagerly and for as long. That’s the kind of stickiness to the facts that just mucks up a good story and a clever sobriquet.

Nor did it matter that the story about a Catholic priest was on the front page one day after it was delivered via a communications device that preceded Johannes Guttenberg, never mind Mark Zuckerberg, by centuries. That would be the pulpits of Catholic churches, from which word of Dowd’s elevation was spread to Montreal’s faithful before the newshounds had wind of it.

It is the sad lot even of great newspapers to be perpetually running behind the times these days. So when any of them deliver, no matter how belatedly, that rare commodity called good news about the Catholic Church, it is cause to stop our watches and cheer.

But if we’re cheering the Dowd story, where does the corruption,  scandal and child abuse come in on the front page? Fittingly, it was in a story about the media itself, to wit about the implosion of press baron Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers.

On the day a Montreal Catholic priest was being feted for becoming a bishop, Murdoch’s News of the World was about to shut its doors forever as what has come to be called the “hacking scandal” erupted with full force.

The timing and juxtaposition could not have been more fitting or satisfying to anyone with even a remote awareness of the merciless savagery with which journalists in general beset the Church in her time of darkness and pain.

It turns out that at least some of the great moral oracles of the media were as corrupt and scandalously self-serving as the tiny minority of priestly deviants who preyed on young children. In fact, there was the shared connection of the abuse of a child. The News of the World ghouls did not inflict sexual depravity, but they exploited one young murder victim by hacking into her cellphone to retrieve personal information.

Curiously, in the torrent of coverage that has poured out since the hacking scandal burst, not once has anyone applied to journalism in general the very judgment that was applied with such tenacity to the Church. Never has it been bruited that the wrongs done were mere symptoms of a deep-rooted “systemic” corruption within the very institution itself.

No, the evil, we were told, was the spawn of a few rogue reporters or, at worst, a single crass tabloid newspaper that simply went too far. Some might buy it. Others might argue that the 40-year descent of the media in general, and newspapers in particular, into agencies for inflicting journalistic ego and sanctimonious hectoring on the world is the root cause of the current scandal.

Have we not all witnessed, after all, the complicity of reporters in the shift away from a mission of explanation and understanding to a culture of humiliation and scorn? Surely that has far more to do with the journalistic wrongdoings wracking the Murdoch papers than priestly celibacy ever did with the Church’s child sexual abuse cases.

I for one will be waiting for a confession to that effect on the front of my daily newspaper.

Good news is always worth waiting for.

(Peter Stockland is the Director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal in Montreal.)

{iarelatednews articleid="5807"}