Religious correspondence

The coverage of the Pope's death ranged from the ignorant to the utterly reverential and there were few female voices in the mix.

RTÉ is often cited, probably correctly, as a crucial if not intentional diluter of the Catholic Church's influence in Ireland. Was it guilt, compensation or just a return to form for the national broadcaster of a once-confessional State that its coverage of the Pope's death was so painfully pious, so cringingly credulous?

Only the occasional feminist squeak was allowed to interrupt the sonorous succession of sentimental banalities in the first couple of days of "coverage".

While of course the broadcaster has to be sensitive to the views of the minority of the audience that might truly be offended by ill-speaking of the pontifical dead, it nonetheless has a public-service job to do. Whatever his personal qualities – and one might say in admiration that "nothing in his life became him like the leaving it" – Pope John Paul II was effectively the chief executive of a vast, wealthy and important organisation that has spent the last quarter-century wracked by scandal and decline in much of the world, notably right here.

This record was not merely papered over. It was virtually ignored.

For better and mostly for worse, the tone of RTÉ on radio was set by two decent men and credible journalists who were starry-eyed about the story. One of them, Sean O'Rourke, aptly though accidentally relabelled the other, Joe Little, the "religious correspondent".

Meejit wasn't in Ireland in 1979, but for the past two decades we've heard the guffaws as people recalled the media's awed innocence and hushed reverence at John Paul's visit. The message of the laughter was that those days are long gone. Who's laughing now?

On RTÉ there was a shocking ignorance of the actual history of the church, lay and hierarchy, over the past half-century. Lest we forget: before Wojtyla's counter-reformation there seemed a real chance of a different sort of church, opening up to new thinking on gender, sexuality, celibacy, internal democracy and the "preferential option for the poor".

Lay people are often accused of "turning away from the church". But a more critical historical sensibility – always a scarce commodity in the media – might well lead one to ask: just who turned away from whom?

On Five Seven Live Philip Boucher Hayes proved conclusively that JP2 was not a conservative, by showing from the archives that, uh, he opposed communism and counted religious freedom as the most important of human rights. Right, a wild radical then.

Across the airwaves, the Pope's thraldom to the rich right-wingers of Opus Dei was a non-issue, and it was widely insisted that he had offered a crushing critique of rampant capitalism. (Yeah, and Bono has the solution to global poverty.)

But judging by deeds rather than words, we see him begin his papacy by crushing the movements in Latin America and elsewhere who saw Christ as a tribune of liberation; and for 25 years he promoted reactionary yes-men.

The effects of his politics, if any, include the immiseration of the peoples of Central America and the former Soviet Union, worse off today than 25 years ago.

That may, of course, be falling into the trap (currently inhabited by most of the world's journalists) of ascribing too much significance to the pope for events outside his authority.

Again and again, for example, we heard that he was "the key figure in the unification of Europe". No one added: "Although we didn't realise it at the time." (Meejit thought the key guy was Bertie Ahern.)

Marian Finucane said the Poles love him because he "got rid of the communists for once and for all". Which must have come as some shock to the ex-communist current president of Poland.

Sean O'Rourke put it to Albert Reynolds that the Pope's visit to Drogheda may have inspired the peace process. "Very, very slowly," Albert didn't reply.

Mary Robinson explained why the Pope was in a particularly good position to influence George Bush and Tony Blair with his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. And that's why the Iraqi people live in peace today.

The only thing John Paul wasn't responsible for, it seems, was clerical sex abuse and cover-ups.

Monday's Irish Times supplement, evidently well planned, was far closer to the mark. However, not unusually, the paper's front page made a mess of it, with a bland editorial whose headline not only repeated a key word from the front page's main headline (generally a newspaper no-no), but seemed to be senseless: "A great leader of this world". This world?

On reflection, however, Meejit reckons this was simply the leader-writer exercising his or her customary caution – carefully reserving judgment on John Paul's stature in the next world.