Tietjens at Rome

I have been lately to Rome to look at a Pope in process and to learn again that not the smallest of the severally irresistible charms of these proceedings is the company of the Italian newspapers, which are always zestfully speculative, generally unafraid of offending, often inescapably incorrect, but never unenlightening, if not about the Church, at least about the Italians.

Journalism is, after all, risk. For it not to risk is for it to remind us again that, while some men are born bores, others can only achieve tiresomeness through a disciplined failure of nerve. Our own journalism’s not infrequent failures of nerve are never so severe as when history embarrasses it with a religious subject. Since papal conclaves have a special grandeur even among the occasions of religion, our journalism leaps into paroxysms of tedium whenever it has to deal with them. The result is a protracted murmur of indifferent veneration governed by the dread of some implication that political considerations might be to any degree an element in the business of the College of Cardinals. And yet how much farther can we go in want of respect for a man than to treat him as though he is so lacking in conscientiously human concerns as not to care about politics at all?

MK

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Murray Kempton

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I have been lately to Rome to look at a Pope in process and to learn again that not the smallest of the severally irresistible charms of these proceedings is the company of the Italian newspapers, which are always zestfully speculative, generally unafraid of offending, often inescapably incorrect, but never unenlightening, if not about the Church, at least about the Italians.

Journalism is, after all, risk. For it not to risk is for it to remind us again that, while some men are born bores, others can only achieve tiresomeness through a disciplined failure of nerve. Our own journalism’s not infrequent failures of nerve are never so severe as when history embarrasses it with a religious subject. Since papal conclaves have a special grandeur even among the occasions of religion, our journalism leaps into paroxysms of tedium whenever it has to deal with them. The result is a protracted murmur of indifferent veneration governed by the dread of some implication that political considerations might be to any degree an element in the business of the College of Cardinals. And yet how much farther can we go in want of respect for a man than to treat him as though he is so lacking in conscientiously human concerns as not to care about politics at all?