Last week the Vatican issued a peculiar clarification: spokesman Greg Burke denied that the Pope had called for Islam and Christianity to “merge”.
You might wonder who on earth would believe the Pope would say such a thing. Yet the story has been widely shared for months and was even picked up by the Drudge Report, one of America’s biggest news aggregators, where it would have been seen by millions around the world.
How did the story get so far? A little googling suggests that the report may have originated from a website called National Report and was gradually picked up across the web. One site ran the headline, “Pope Francis At White House: ‘Koran And Holy Bible Are The Same.’” The site reported that the Pope had claimed: “Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world. For centuries, blood has been needlessly shed because of the desire to segregate our faiths.”
The man on the street, with a limited interest in the Church, might believe this story at first glance.
As Jack Valero of Catholic Voices explained: “I think it fits in with what people think of Pope Francis: they see rightly he is in favour of peace and against religious violence and conclude wrongly he must think all religions are the same.”
But most people, after a pause for thought and a closer look, would soon detect the number of holes puncturing the story.
For instance, the muddled article described how St John Paul II had “courted several controversies since being elected as Pope Benedicto [sic] XVI’s replacement in 2013.”
Furthermore, the full quotation attributed to Francis read oddly: “We can accomplish miraculous things in the world by merging our faiths, and the time for such a movement is now. No longer shall we slaughter our neighbours over differences in reference to their God.”
The notion that any pope would ever call for a “movement” to merge Christianity and Islam is ludicrous, especially in a global context where sensitivities regarding Islamic identity are proving deadly. So why did the story gain credibility?
First, Catholics are accustomed to Pope Francis making outrageous, off-the-cuff remarks at times while blithely placing his trust in journalists who don’t take notes or record what he’s saying. Papal biographer Paul Vallely wrote in a 2015 Guardian article that the loquacious Pope was deliberately devaluing the currency of papal utterances by being more willing to communicate with the press.
“It is all part of dismantling the old imperial papacy… He knows he will need a few more years to entrench that idea into the Catholic hierarchy,” Vallely argued.
But Francis’s approach unnerves some, and the emergence of fake news is likely to feed anxieties. The “quote” about Islam will have heightened fears that Francis is too ready to reach out to other faiths at the risk of diluting the practices of his own. For example, the Pope’s decision to wash the feet of Muslim inmates on Maundy Thursday, saying we are all “sons of the same God who want to live in peace”, alarmed some Catholics.
So how can Catholics make sure that what they are reading is true? There is always the 155-year-old method of consulting the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which is the authoritative source on papal comments to the press.
As for official statements, the Vatican website remains the first place to look, Catholics, especially those in the media, might also heed the words of Fr John-Paul Evans, who advised: “Let us return to the noble and simple process of the Church teaching coming through officially promulgated letters and documents rather than hearsay and speculation based on unscripted conversations and audiences. Then these stories would be seen for what they are … A smoke screen deployed by the Devil.”
Fake news is a novel challenge, but eventually the world will get better at quickly spotting it, much as it has become more astute at sniffing out spam or hacked email accounts.
Until then, patience is an important virtue. As one blogger put it at athanasiuscm.com: “We should not be given to jump into criticism of the Pope at every turn. If he says something that is scandalous, then we should look into it. But being duped by hoaxes plays into the hands of the Church’s enemies.”
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