collingwest | Burying Ledes, Not Pets

This isn’t the post I thought I was going to write.

I thought I was going to write about Pope Francis’ tone deafness with respect to his January 5th general address and its comments about pets versus children. But when I dug deeper, it turned out that the entire situation was little more than manufactured outrage and upset.

It’s understandable why this might have happened. The media did, after all, do a very good job of putting sound bites into their ledes:

Pope Francis has criticized couples who choose to have pets instead of children as selfish, arguing that their decision to forgo parenthood leads to a loss of “humanity” and is a detriment to civilization. [CNN]

In a move likely to raise the hackles of millions of cats, dogs and their human cohabitees [sic], Pope Francis has suggested that couples who prefer pets to children are selfish. [The Guardian]

Pope Francis said that people who adopt pets instead of children were exhibiting a “form of selfishness” as he presided over his first general audience of the new year. [NBC]

Pope Francis criticized individuals who opt for having pets instead of children, saying that a “denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us.” [USA Today]

Based on these four sentences, it seems clear that the leader of the world’s Catholics was stating that couples who don’t have children are selfish to the point of possibly not even being human. The ledes do vaguely suggest that he may only have been talking about voluntarily childfree couples instead of involuntarily childless couples, but it’s not clear enough to be certain. The only thing that was relatively certain was that the comment was, as The Guardian noted, bound to upset a lot of people.

I was planning to jump on that same bandwagon, but in the interests of fairness, decided to go to the actual text and pull quotes in context, instead of depending on secondary sources. It’s a basic tenet of research (and journalism!) that no matter how reliable a secondary source may be, it’s never as solid as a primary one; and in this case, the primary source was easily available via the Vatican’s web site.

Was I ever in for a surprise! In the midst of my own emotional reaction, I hadn’t remembered that almost all media sources — secular and Catholic — have biases and slants.

It wasn’t until I read the actual address that I learned that the pope’s comments about pets versus children were only about a hundred words of the 1,400-word address. In other words, the ledes — which are supposed to summarize the most important aspects of the article — instead focused on a mere 7% of the overall address and presented it as the main topic.

It wasn’t the main topic, though. It wasn’t even close. The pope opened the address by stating the main topic:

Today we will reflect on Saint Joseph as the father of Jesus. The evangelists Matthew and Luke present him as the foster father of Jesus, and not as his biological father. Matthew specifies this, avoiding the formula “the father of”, used in the genealogy for all the ancestors of Jesus; instead, he defines Joseph as the “husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (1:16). Luke, on the other hand, affirms it by saying that he was Jesus’ “supposed” father (3:23), that is, he appeared as His father.

Only one of the media articles I list above even mentions that the address was actually the sixth in Pope Francis’ continuing series of catechetical teachings about Joseph of Nazareth, and that one buries it halfway down in the article. A couple of the others generically state that the address concerns “fatherhood,” but that’s an oversimplification to the point of error. The address was about non-biological fatherhood, which is a very specific role.

To bring a child into the world is not enough to say that one is also their father or mother. “Fathers are not born, but made. A man does not become a father simply by bringing a child into the world, but by taking up the responsibility to care for that child. Whenever a man accepts responsibility for the life of another, in some way he becomes a father to that person” (Apostolic Letter Patris corde).

Is there anyone, parent, childless or childfree, who would disagree with the idea that mere biological paternity does not equate to “real” fatherhood? Memes about “sperm donors” abound all over social media, but they’re nothing new; the derogatory use of the term came along long before the age of the Internet. This statement from the pope is hardly inflammatory; if it’s a criticism, it’s limited to fathers who voluntarily refuse to have anything to do with their children.

Francis continues the address by talking about parenthood by way of adoption versus pregnancy, explicitly stating that it’s not a “secondary” or “fall back” position:

I think particularly of all those who are open to welcoming life by way of adoption, which is such a generous and beautiful, good attitude. Joseph shows us that this type of bond is not secondary; it is not second best. This kind of choice is among the highest forms of love, and of fatherhood and motherhood. How many children in the world are waiting for someone to take care of them!

The societal attitude that adoption is secondary to biological parenthood is something that has been well-documented in everything from articles to blog posts to peer-reviewed sociological research papers. There’s still a significant stigma against both birth mothers who give up their children, and against mothers whose children are adopted instead of biological. It would seem entirely within the purview of a pro-life Church to want to address and reduce this stigma, as Pope Francis is doing here.

Addressing and reducing stigmas around adoption isn’t a criticism of either the childfree or the childless. At best, it’s pro-natal instead of anti-natal, but even that’s something of a stretch. It certainly isn’t something that should create any sort of backlash. The backlash-inducing part comes later in that same paragraph, in a single passage that seems to be the only one quoted in the media:

…many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one because they do not want any more, but they have two dogs, two cats…. Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children. Yes, it is funny, I understand, but it is the reality. And this denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity. And in this way civilization becomes more aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood.

Nobody is calling anyone less-than-human here. Instead, Pope Francis saying that human society is diminished by the growing tendency toward not having children. This isn’t a new teaching of the Church, and it’s a statement that nobody should be surprised to hear from this particular pope, who has previously referenced the clear Catholic teachings about marriage and family.

Quite honestly, the statement seems to be addressed to parents who might not believe that some people would go so far as to choose to treat their pets as if they’re their children. Yes, he tells those parents, it’s true: some people really do that. He’s also making reference to the “graying” of many national populations, which is an established and scientific fact.

The Holy Father then takes the point further by addressing one of the many reasons that people choose to be childfree: fear. He equates fear of adoption with fear of having biological children, and urges people to consider what they’re missing when they give in to that fear.

…having a child is always a risk, either naturally or by adoption. But it is riskier not to have them. It is riskier to deny fatherhood or to deny motherhood, be it real or spiritual. A man or a woman who do not voluntarily develop a sense of fatherhood or motherhood are lacking something fundamental, something important. Think about this, please.

Exactly where in this paragraph is the pope calling anyone selfish? Encouraging people not to give in to their fears is offering support, not condemning or criticizing.

The term, “burying the lede,” refers to initial sentences that hide or misrepresent the most important and relevant pieces of a story. Editors and journalists quite rightly criticize doing so, since at best it tests readers’ patience and, at worst, actively misleads them. If the social media backlash about the pope’s comments is any indicator, the worst is what has happened here. The news sources may have gotten their clicks and fanned the flames of outrage, but it was done on a false premise. Thus, the outrage and upset is entirely artificial.

I’m going to write a follow-up post talking about how adoption isn’t a magic bullet for the involuntarily childless; and that despite Pope Francis’ encouragement, it’s not as easy as it sounds. But let’s get this out of the way first: the pope wasn’t zeroing in on either childless or childfree people; nor was he commenting about pet ownership. He was touting the good of adoption, using St. Joseph as an example, and that point is extremely clear from the moment a person starts reading the actual address instead of the news coverage.

Originally posted at https://secondrow.stannumenterprises.com/2022/burying-ledes-not-pets/.