Barbara and Benedict

I Have no Pope in This Fight

Barbara Walters and Pope Benedict XVI died a day apart at the end of 2022. He was 95, she was 93. There was much to admire in both, but the marked difference in the coverage of their deaths in mainstream publications and television is noteworthy. And I think the reason is not merely that one was a famous broadcast journalist and one a Christian religious leader. Perceived political persuasions and received wisdom about Roman Catholicism also played a role.

Walters was widely praised as having smashed through glass-ceilings and as having been a “trailblazer” in her field. Almost every headline after her death included some variation on “pioneer,” “icon,” “feminist role model” or even “legend.” Among the comments about her career: “Until Barbara Walters we only saw women showing us the weather. Because of her struggle to fight the establishment, we now see women everywhere reading the news and opining on the news.” And “Without Barbara Walters there would not have been any woman you see on evening, morning, and daily news.” I mean…seriously? True, she was a “first” of a kind on television. She was the first American woman to co-anchor a news show (where Harry Reasoner made his displeasure clear), and she certainly had to put up with indignities: I read that when she was on the Today Show, she had to wait for her male co-host to ask three questions before she could ask one.

But she was hardly the first female newswoman or even the first female reporter one would have seen on television. What of the magnificent Martha Gellhorn, who covered D-Day and Dachau, who interviewed Chiang Kai-shek, who wrote first-hand reports of the Spanish Civil War? Her The Face of War is war-writing on par with - or better than - that of A.J. Liebling or Ernie Pyle. She never let anything stop her, not sexism or ageism or being perpetually known as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. She was writing travelogues well into her senior years. What of Lee Miller, who wrote about fashion and art, but who was also the only woman correspondent at the Siege of St. Malo and who triumphantly tramped her boots, muddy from Dachau, all over Hitler’s Munich apartment? (She also took a bath there.)

What of Dorothy Thompson, an early and leading opponent of Hitler, considered the most influential woman in American journalism during the later 1930s and a leading journalist, period? Katharine Hepburn’s character in Woman of the Year is based on Thompson.

And what about May Craig? Craig covered World War II and the Korean War and was also a White House correspondent (as early as the FDR years) and a frequent guest on Meet the Press in the 1950s and 1960s. You can see her in action at news conferences with JFK below: what strikes me is the obvious affection and respect Kennedy had for her. You can also see a kind of flirtation and fun that would get a politician raked over the coals today. (We have lost our sense of humour.) Craig is at the 49 second mark and later at the 2:15 mark.

[JFK: Absolute Charmer.]

(A slight digression: I don’t think he actually answered a single question in the above clip. But no one seemed upset. He had a real gift. Easy to see why this man so appealed to people; easy to see why, as my parents told me, not only were they crying on November 22nd, 1963, but they saw more people crying in the streets that day than there had been on VE Day.)

So there were plenty of trailblazers and glass ceiling-smashers before Barbara Walters - very impressive women. What she did differently, I guess, was that she was primarily a television journalist at a time when network news was huge and at a time that corresponded with the 1970s women’s movement. She even became the focus of a classic Saturday Night Live skit. While I think she was a very intelligent person - and I so admire how she just kept on keeping on with minimal fuss, after the debacle with Reasoner - she chose to go the celebrity route from about the 1980s on, and on top of this, she inflicted The View on the world, something which can perhaps not be forgiven.

And then there’s Pope Benedict XVI, who would have forgiven her. Now, I am not Catholic. I have no pope in this fight. But it was hard not to notice how the coverage of his death always seemed to involve the word “conservative,” likely not meant as a descriptive but rather a caveat, a criticism (never as praise) and as a way to place him in opposition to the current pope, not to mention the chattering classes. I noticed CNN airing a fawning tribute to Walters one night, followed by a report on Benedict’s “complicated” legacy. For Heaven’s sake, though, popes are generally conservative, aren’t they? They are popes. And they generally have complicated legacies - John XXIII certainly did and I believe Pope Francis will. I remember when the latter made a comment to the effect that - though he believed gay couples should have the possibility of civil unions, in order to protect their rights - he did not believe priests could bless a same-sex marriage. People reacted with shock and anger - as though he had personally betrayed them - and all I could think was, “Why are you surprised that the pope is Catholic?” Sheesh. (I’ve been for gay marriage since the Pleistocene epoch, but I believe in religious freedom and see no reason a church should have to comply in this regard.)

Benedict was indeed conservative, which - it should be pointed out - is not a bad thing. He was a serious thinker, a scholar with an interest in political theory and in trying to find a way to blend a spiritual life with the demands of the quotidian. A nice piece about that here (by someone who is a distant in-law of mine.) His Regensburg address, about the need to combine faith and reason in our lives, is, I think, one of the great speeches of our time. One could never imagine Francis, however lovely a man he is, writing or giving a lecture like that.

What Benedict never wanted was to abandon principles in order to fit in with the modern world, or to fit in with the zeitgeist for the sake of popularity. The cool kids were of no interest to him. But he was not, as popular analysis insists, a paleo-conservative - heck, he spoke out against factory farming. He had a friendship, an intellectual exchange, with journalist and atheist Oriana Fallaci. They found kinship in their common interest in history and culture and she developed enormous regard for him.

She did confide that she kept in touch with the Pope and that they occasionally exchanged pieces of music…Her respect for Ratzinger may partly explain why she donated her papers to the Pontifical Lateran University.

In short, there was an openness and compassion to Benedict for which he gets little credit. He did not have the charisma of his predecessor, the equally (if not more) conservative John Paul II, or his successor, the flashier Francis. And just as the reaction to Walters’ death reflects her celebrity status, the reaction to Benedict’s - including his low-key funeral - reflects his lack of interest in such nonsense, and his lack of a “correct” worldview.