One was a time of faith, joy, affirmation and prayer. The other was an occasion for some members of the media to promote their own agenda and rehash anything negative that could be said about the Church for the one hundredth time. One group was part of a pilgrimage of faith. Not too long ago, I read some articles in a couple of Catholic publications that cater to different groups on the fringes of the Church. Since I was familiar with the material about which they were writing, I knew that the stories were filled with inaccuracies and made unsubstantiated and false charges against individuals and groups within the Church.
Truth is one of the great casualties of the modern media era.
We are told that the medium is the message. Once this is accepted, truth remains incidental. For example, I remember standing at a rally of the Communist Party in Rome in the 1970s and listening to the speaker announce that any means that carries the party to power are justifiable and any word spoken to advance the party is truth. A just and properly functioning society is impossible without a level of trust and understanding rooted in the truth. Human interchange, whether it be personal, economic, cultural or moral, is not possible unless we agree that words must convey truth, at least the objective truth available to us all or the truth as one understands it.