Vox Parva | Overstated and understated universal Church news

Benedict Keith Ip

The influx of information overwhelmed us. The experience was substantial especially in the 4th quarter of this year. This was because I moved to a new industry, an industry that readily kills time. In other words, time is squeezed to the point of losing elementary sense of it, where it is crucial to chase up every second, rather than crystalizing moments into theories as in my previous jobs. The answer: It is the so called the media industry that demands of us to use every second, not because of hitting deadlines or submitting articles, but due to the very fact that we human beings create so many joyful, entertaining, as well as disastrous, and calamitous events.
As my story is barely worthy of sharing in the newspaper, I will just stop here. But I did learn a lesson worth sharing: It is difficult to develop an accurate and fair opinion in a short period of time. I do not know whether one year is enough to conclude thus, but even in nine months I fail to come to a sound conclusion.
The first lesson is in overstatement. Some of my viewpoints regarding Pope Francis are error prone, as is common to other fellows in the media, being that we treated a minor story as big news. “I extend best wishes to your Excellency and your fellow citizens, and I invoke the divine blessings of peace and well-being upon the nation,” was probably the most groundbreaking message the Pope sent to the Chinese President Xi Jin-Ping in August as a courtesy in appreciation for letting his airplane fly through China to Korea. In this case let me borrow the words of the veteran church news analyst John Allen, Jr., who is now the associate editor of Crux, a Boston Globe website. “The truth is that the prospect of ties between Rome and Beijing is a ‘one step forward, two steps back’ dance that’s been underway for decades, and was never going be brought to conclusion by a simple telegram.” And although I shared in John Allen’s viewpoint in my September opinion column, I committed an overstatement at the time on some other social issues – not necessarily so in this specific regards.
The second lesson is in understatement. A few days before Christmas, Pope Francis had identified 15 diseases spreading throughout the Church. And in fact, they have been spreading from a very long time ago, having corroded the community from within. In an unexpectedly long speech, or rather a comprehensive report, those diseases are directed towards every Christian: feeling “indispensable”, having “a heart of stone”, wanting to plan everything, losing one’s memory of one’s encounter with the Lord, vanity, gossip, the desire to accumulate things or riches, membership of closed circles, transforming service into power, etc. It seems people generally understate the power of egoism.
With this Christmas period, it is the right time to examine our weaknesses – overstatement, understatement and narrow points of view, as those grave sins affect far more than our political perspectives.