It seems to me that there are differences in the way that “Catholic bashing” is done. The majority of CAF members, as far as I can judge, are living in North America, and it seems that “Catholic bashing” there comes largely from fundamentalist Christian groups. In Ireland, it tends to come from the media. I suppose it’s not surprising that there is more Catholic bashing from the media rather than other religious groups - up until the 1990’s nearly 95% of Irish people identified themselves as Catholic. The rest were mainly Church of Ireland (Anglican). The idea of Evangelical Churches and non-denominational churches is quite a new phenomenon here, but I have only heard of one or two who speak venomously of the Catholic Church. In general there are good relations between all the main Christian denominations. The media, on the other hand, tend to take many “cheap shots” at the Catholic Faith. It has become easier and easier over the years, especially in the aftermath of the sexual abuse revelations, and probably because the Holy See is not in the business about taking libel actions against newspapers! Indeed we saw just last week how irresponsible certain sections of the media can be in reporting issues relating to Catholicism - when all newspapers, as far as I can tell (even the broadsheets) reported that Pope Benedict had said that homosexuals could bring about the end of the human race, that homosexuals were evil, etc. There was no evidence that reporters had actually read a translation of the letter (granted there is no offical translation as yet). There are very few reporters in the mainstream media who show in their writing that they have really tried to examine authentic Catholic teaching - I doubt that the average reporter who gives out about Catholic teaching on contraception and sexuality, for example, has ever set their eyes on “Humanae Vitae” - if they did, they would see that, even if they don’t agree with the Church, the teaching is completely logical. Anyway, I could babble on and on about Church and media relations in Ireland, but there is certainly plenty of Catholic bashing about. I don’t know about the rest of Europe - it will be very interesting to find out!
