UNITED STATES
The Costarican Times
Martin LeFevre
“60 Minutes,” one of America’s last remaining bulwarks of the status quo, devoted a full fawning hour to Pope Francis Sunday, between Christmas and New Years. Can this media-canonized pope save the world’s institutions, beginning with the Catholic Church and extending to the American-made international system?
What’s at issue is the whole crumbling world order, and the desperate need by those in positions of wealth and power (and make no mistake about it, the papacy is a position of wealth and power) to shore up the rotten timbers, even as more and more people are giving up on religions and the old order altogether.
When I was young, the news magazine “60 Minutes” challenged the powers that be, but in recent years it has been more concerned with falling ratings and stale rehash. It also has a developed a decidedly reactionary bent that covers the spectrum from nostalgia to ‘ain’t America wonderful’ segments.
But three puff pieces on the pope is too much. Toadying to the pope’s image, the show quotes a cardinal waxing lyrical about Pope Francis: “An evangelizer must never look like someone who is coming back from a funeral.” America’s leading news magazine is now shilling for this pope’s mission of remaking the Roman Catholic Church into a “missionary church.”
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