Damian on SC

Damian Thompson is the editor of the Catholic Herald, a British Catholic paper we refer to here often. Today, he continues his fulminating against the bishops' offices:

Real anger is building up in the parishes over the bishops’ behaviour, which led to the document – Sacramentum Caritatis - a historic, 60-page statement on the Eucharist and the Liturgy – receiving minimal coverage in most secular newspapers.

The Pope’s pronouncement, an Apostolic Exhortation, was a huge story for my newspaper, The Catholic Herald, which will publish full coverage of the document this weekend.

I can’t tell you how infuriating – and downright weird – it was to discover that our bishops just weren’t interested in talking to us about its contents.

So, yesterday, we took an unusual step. The Catholic Herald lodged a formal complaint with the Vatican’s worldwide head of communications, Archbishop John Foley, Prefect of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communication.

Why did the Bishops of England and Wales keep silent? Inevitably, conspiracy theories are already forming, suggesting that they didn’t like the contents of the document. And I’m sure that some of them didn’t.

Pope Benedict calls for all new priests to be trained to say the new rite of Mass in Latin – he has yet to pronounce on the future of the Old Rite – and for a return to Gregorian chant. He also seems to shut the door on the prospect of married priests.

Not the sort of thing that the English Church’s right-on employees like to promulgate.

But those are side issues. The real point of Sacramentum Caritatis (Sacrament of Love) was its fabulously lucid and intellectually daring synthesis of Catholic teaching on the centre of the Church’s life – the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.

Reading the exhortation, I was awestruck by the quality of Benedict’s thinking: this is the most intellectually gifted pope for centuries. He spent months working on the document.

Today, two days late, the English and Welsh bishops’ website finally posted THREE WHOLE PARAGRAPHS on the subject. The Irish bishops, in contrast, issued a long and comprehensive response, setting out all the key points, on the day of publication.

So far as I am aware, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster,  has yet to say a word publicly about Pope Benedict’s exhortation. It is inconceivable that his predecessor, Cardinal Basil Hume, would have been guilty of such an omission.

His initial blast on the subject.

It's good we don't have that kind of problem over here.

Update:

I added this to the comments, but I might as well note it up here, with some elaboration.

I might be wrong, but my sense of why Thompson is frustrated is not primarily because the bishops' website didn't fling up a link to the doc right away on their website but because, first, in his own attempt to pull a story together, he couldn't find a bishop who cared:

I can’t tell you how infuriating – and downright weird – it was to discover that our bishops just weren’t interested in talking to us about its contents.

And, in addition, what Thompson seems to be saying (and he can correct me if I'm wrong) is that when you have a story like this - the story of a new, rather important and certainly interesting document coming from Rome, you know that the secular news media will run something on it. Even though they will put it through their own filters, they will cover it. So - shouldn't the bishops/national hierarchy of the Church take the lead in trying to communicate the contents of this document to the press of its own country? Aren't they the natural go-betweens who should have had calls in to every major press office, saying, "This is going to drop on 3/13. We'll be ready to help you understand it and comment on it for your coverage."

Yes? No?