Countering The Narrative

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The tactic being used by the Times at the moment is as old as the hills. Establish a narrative, then keep repeating it, until it becomes received wisdom. Is there anybody in the English-speaking who soesn't know that Joseph Ratzinger was in the Hitler Youth? But how many people know that he stood up to a CO who wanted all his charges to become soldiers by saying that he wanted to become a priest? Next to nobody.

If the narrative is never challenged, it becomes what everybody believes, and even ten years ago, the media's narratives were impossible to challenge unless you happened to have a media organisation of your own.

But that's not true any more: nearly all sources of information on the Internet, be they press sites, or social media sites like this, offer the opportunity to comment.

We are all Internet-savvy people: I must be to be writing this; you must be to be reading this and commenting on it. So get commenting. Every time you see a piece about the Pope that is not true, challenge it. Use for example the Pope's letter to Ireland, available here, to challenge anybody who says "the Pope didn't apologise" by cutting and pasting the sections where the Pope apologises. Some of you will want to do so politely, others will take on the tone of the milieu in which they find themselves. It doesn't matter too much as long as we are accurate, and cite our sources.

This is a poor man's Internet version of the Catholic Evidence Guild going out to Speakers' Corner: but we can all do it.