Papal visits are bigger than Ben Hur. Not least among the challenges they pose is how to satisfy the demands of the mass media for information and opinions. The quality of the response shapes the way the event is seen.
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Great Britain last year prompted an interesting experiment. The Catholic Church asked for lay volunteers to deal with media enquiries and to appear on panels. The volunteers were trained by a panel who prepared them for the questions they would be likely to receive and commended a style of communicating.
Austen Ivereigh and Kathleen Griffin, journalists who coordinated the scheme, have now given an account of it in their book, Catholic Voices: Putting the case for the Church in an era of 24-hour news. They describe the process, outline the way they addressed controversial questions, and offer the guiding philosophy of communication. The book may well be used as a handbook by other churches for their dealings with the media.
When I first read of the Catholic Voices project before the Papal visit I had some reservations. It could be construed as an exercise in corporate spin with its primary focus on persuasion and not on truth. The book is reassuring on that point. But its virtues prompt searching questions about the way communication takes place both in churches and in public life.
The questions for which the volunteers were prepared include most of the current controversies involving the Catholic Church. Catholic attitudes to the church and politics, homosexuality, contraception, equality, euthanasia, sexual abuse, Catholic schools, abortion, Aids, and relations with Anglicans all receive attention.
They are treated briefly in simple language that equipped people for short interviews with journalists without specialist knowledge. The teaching and practice of the Catholic Church are summarised, the reasons for them explained, and the objections against them teased out.
The treatment is urbane, respectful of journalists and of the media to which they belong. In each case attention is paid to the positive values that underlie both Catholic teaching and the objections raised by its critics.
The eirenical character of the presentation flows from the simple principles of good communication enunciated in the