Black sheep
The Vatican Caught Between Two Lesbian Women: Why the Interview with the Holocaust-Denying Bishop Is Also a Bit of a Media Scandal. Op-ed by Jürg Altwegg, Geneva correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The NZZ put us on the trail. The Vatican, reported its correspondent in Rome, blamed two "anti-clerical French journalists" for the furor surrounding the negationist bishop. Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner were named. Together they had orchestrated a plot against the Pope. The Vatican trapped by two women? Thanks to the internet and the archives, it is relatively easy to follow the traces backwards.
As the scandal over the four Integrist bishops, whom the Pope had welcomed back into the fold of the Church, was approaching its climax, Caroline Fourest published an article in Le Monde entitled "Peter and the black sheep". The author reported on the activities of traditionalists who regularly read masses for the fascist writer Maurice Bardèche. Who regularly make pilgrimages to Auschwitz to reverently commemorate a genocide - not the Shoah. But the "genocide of aborted fetuses". Caroline Fourest knew that Pope Benedict was very popular in these circles.
Caroline Fourest is a regular columnist on religious issues for Le Monde. She can be heard on the radio, works as an editor for a magazine and is also a welcome guest on talk shows because of her contentiousness. Her most recent book was on the Vatican's links to the ultra-nationalists. This is one of her specialties.
Caroline Fourest has also published books and articles together with Fiammetta Venner. They have taken on the fundamentalists of all religions - Jewish, Islamic and Christian. Also because of their homophobia. Fourest, not yet much older than thirty, fights for gay rights, presides over their association and appears on television with Fiammetta Venner as a relaxed couple.
Conspiracy theories - even if they come from the Vatican - must be distrusted. However, the question of whether Fourest and Venner really wanted to pull off a coup can certainly be asked. That would not be a scandal in itself. They know the negationist swamp inside out. And the detour via Swedish television also proves to be extremely clever. Perhaps the dubious Bishop Williamson was well informed. And was happy to go along with it. The two French women arranged the interview, which was recorded last November. Fiammetta Venner was a guest on the program in which it was broadcast.
"We tipped off our colleagues," she explains in response to the accusations from Rome. And speaks of a "bad joke": "We've also been lumped in with the Freemasons. Because we are anti-clerical - but it seemed to me to be about fundamentalists. Neither we nor Swedish television know the papal calendar in the
Ahead."
Was the timing so perfect just by chance? The fact that Fourest and Venner were well informed about the imminent rehabilitation of the expelled bishops is shown by their publications in the weeks beforehand. The Williamson interview was a great prank, a brilliant staging. And it is a cynical lesson in how politics and the media work.
It is not Caroline Fourest's role as instigator and mediator that is scandalous. But her journalistic appearance as a commentator on a production in which she played a central role leaves a stale aftertaste - because the reader learns nothing about it. This aspect was also not mentioned in the interview that Le Monde conducted with Venner.
These contexts are not conducive to the credibility of the relentlessly writing, mercilessly arguing French journalists. But they are even less of an excuse for the Vatican and the Pope. However clumsily they have fallen into the trap of two women: The case of the bishop who denies the existence of the gas chambers and calls this a "free expression of opinion by a non-historian" is more than a communication problem.
As the scandal over the four Integrist bishops, whom the Pope had welcomed back into the fold of the Church, was approaching its climax, Caroline Fourest published an article in Le Monde entitled "Peter and the black sheep". The author reported on the activities of traditionalists who regularly read masses for the fascist writer Maurice Bardèche. Who regularly make pilgrimages to Auschwitz to reverently commemorate a genocide - not the Shoah. But the "genocide of aborted fetuses". Caroline Fourest knew that Pope Benedict was very popular in these circles.
Caroline Fourest is a regular columnist on religious issues for Le Monde. She can be heard on the radio, works as an editor for a magazine and is also a welcome guest on talk shows because of her contentiousness. Her most recent book was on the Vatican's links to the ultra-nationalists. This is one of her specialties.
Caroline Fourest has also published books and articles together with Fiammetta Venner. They have taken on the fundamentalists of all religions - Jewish, Islamic and Christian. Also because of their homophobia. Fourest, not yet much older than thirty, fights for gay rights, presides over their association and appears on television with Fiammetta Venner as a relaxed couple.
Conspiracy theories - even if they come from the Vatican - must be distrusted. However, the question of whether Fourest and Venner really wanted to pull off a coup can certainly be asked. That would not be a scandal in itself. They know the negationist swamp inside out. And the detour via Swedish television also proves to be extremely clever. Perhaps the dubious Bishop Williamson was well informed. And was happy to go along with it. The two French women arranged the interview, which was recorded last November. Fiammetta Venner was a guest on the program in which it was broadcast.
"We tipped off our colleagues," she explains in response to the accusations from Rome. And speaks of a "bad joke": "We've also been lumped in with the Freemasons. Because we are anti-clerical - but it seemed to me to be about fundamentalists. Neither we nor Swedish television know the papal calendar in the
Ahead."
Was the timing so perfect just by chance? The fact that Fourest and Venner were well informed about the imminent rehabilitation of the expelled bishops is shown by their publications in the weeks beforehand. The Williamson interview was a great prank, a brilliant staging. And it is a cynical lesson in how politics and the media work.
It is not Caroline Fourest's role as instigator and mediator that is scandalous. But her journalistic appearance as a commentator on a production in which she played a central role leaves a stale aftertaste - because the reader learns nothing about it. This aspect was also not mentioned in the interview that Le Monde conducted with Venner.
These contexts are not conducive to the credibility of the relentlessly writing, mercilessly arguing French journalists. But they are even less of an excuse for the Vatican and the Pope. However clumsily they have fallen into the trap of two women: The case of the bishop who denies the existence of the gas chambers and calls this a "free expression of opinion by a non-historian" is more than a communication problem.
