No evidence of media prejudice against Catholicism

Pope Francis

Did you know Fairfax and the ABC are involved in a concerted attack on religious freedom in general, and the Catholic Church in particular? You didn’t?  Well, Senator George Brandis thinks you should.

Two weeks ago, the federal Attorney-General delivered a lecture on religious freedom to the Law School of the University of Notre Dame in Sydney. Freedom of religion is too often ignored, he complained, when human rights and freedoms are discussed and defended. He then launched into an extraordinary attack on Fairfax Media and the ABC. It is worth quoting at some length: “In fact, not only has religious freedom been neglected, it has actually been the subject of open attack from those who dominated much of our political discourse, particularly in the national broadcaster and the Fairfax media.  Almost invariably, their targets have been the Christian churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, and people of Jewish faith.

“Indeed, so deaf have we become to attacks upon religious liberty, so accepting have we been of the open scorn with which their tenets, their liturgy, their customs, their clergy and their congregations have been derided, that the great Dyson Heydon, delivering the Acton Lecture in April of this year, was moved to describe anti-Catholicism in modern Australia as ‘the racism of the intellectuals’.”

Did Brandis offer his listeners a single example of this onslaught against religious freedom?  Did he quote one program on the ABC, or one article in a Fairfax newspaper, that treated Catholic or Jewish tenets, liturgy and congregations with scorn? No, he did not. Not one. Which prompts me to wonder what the hell he was talking about.

“Now there may be a new anti-Catholic movement, particularly among the intellectuals. To adapt Windhorst’s aphorism, anti-Catholicism in Australia now might be called ‘the racism of the intellectuals’. This new anti-Catholicism may backfire as much as Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.  It is intolerant.  It is hypocritical.  It fails to recognise the extraordinary contribution of Australian Catholicism to education, to charitable relief, to the running of hospitals, to social progress of all kinds, to political life, and indeed to the life of the nation as a whole.”

Like Brandis, Heydon saw no need to bore his listeners with actual instances or evidence – the existence of this modern anti-Catholic Kulturkampf is, to both of them, self-evident. Well, it isn’t to me.

After playing some long extracts from Senator Brandis’ lecture on his Religion and Ethics Report, the ABC’s Andrew West turned to that classic “anti-Catholic” intellectual, David Marr, for a “response”. Marr said he “supposed” Brandis was referring to the way Fairfax and ABC journalists had covered the issue of child abuse.

But is this really what Brandis was referring to?  Was he really claiming that the sustained criticism in the media of the way the Catholic Church, and other religious institutions, have dealt with both the victims and the perpetrators of child abuse – criticism that has been so amply justified by the revelations of the current royal commission – constituted a sustained and unjustified attack on the tenets, the liturgy, the customs, the clergy and the congregations of the Catholic Church (and, for that matter, on the Jewish faith)?

Does that critical journalism – or even the satire and mockery, in some quarters, that it has given rise to – constitute what Heydon chose to call “the racism of the intellectuals”? It doesn’t seem a tenable proposition to me. Yet, if Brandis and Heydon were not talking about the coverage of child abuse, what on earth were they talking about?

After all, Australian Catholics are doing pretty well at the moment. In a Liberal-National Party Coalition government, the Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, the Treasurer and some five other cabinet ministers are Catholics – a situation unthinkable in the overwhelmingly Protestant Liberal Party led by Robert Menzies.

The Catholic Church still seems to wield enormous influence in the ALP and the wider labour movement. Overwhelmingly popular social measures, from same-sex marriage to voluntary euthanasia, have been blocked in the Federal Parliament, largely thanks to the opposition of Christian, and especially Catholic, union leaders and parliamentarians of all parties. This is not a church that is suffering – to outside eyes at least – from persecution, discrimination or loss of political clout.

But if Marr is right, and Brandis and Heydon are actually talking about the reportage and commentary surrounding child abuse, that would be even more troubling. Certainly, investigative journalism by the likes of the Newcastle Herald‘s Joanne McCarthy and ABC Lateline‘s Suzanne Smith, among many others, led directly to Gillard government’s decision to set up the royal commission. Should those reporters instead have turned a blind eye to the perpetrators and their protectors in the Catholic Church, out of respect for “the extraordinary contribution of Australian Catholicism … to the life of the nation as a whole”? Of course not.

It is shocking and unacceptable that the nation’s senior law officer should be accusing two of its main media organisations of conducting a systematic campaign against religious freedom, and that one of its most respected former High Court judges should be hurling around phrases such as “the racism of the intellectuals”, both without offering a skerrick of evidence or justification.

Gentlemen, I challenge you to put up, or back down.

Jonathan Holmes is an Age columnist and a former presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch program.