How can one keep one’s faith in a secular world? asked the host of a CBC radio show. But as the papal coverage built to a deafening crescendo over the past week, until it was difficult to distinguish some of our main media outlets from the Vatican press office, I started to ponder a different question: “How can one keep any sort of secular perspective in a world awash in faith?”

In fact, I suspect the world isn’t as awash in faith as it may have seemed. Listening to people on the street, one got a more grounded view of the situation. But the mainstream media would have none of that, as the coverage soared with the flourish of full organ pipes.

By midweek, those attending World Youth Day weren’t just participants, they had been transformed into “pilgrims.” Huh? Is that the CBC I just turned on or Radio Free Vatican?

The visit of a leader of one of the world’s biggest religions is certainly a news story deserving coverage. Isn’t the job of the media to cover an event, not to celebrate it?

Celebration and hype has become the stock-in-trade of the media, but there’s usually a little self-restraint, a faint glimmer of recognition that the media should be slightly detached from events and skeptical of power. When it came to the Pope’s visit, however, the gloves were on. It was reverence, 24/7.

The suspension of normal skepticism is undoubtedly related to the notion that the Pope is a religious leader, not a political figure. Yet it is hard to imagine anything more political, in any meaningful sense of the word, than the Catholic Church, which exercises enormous clout in the lives of people all over the world — particularly women.

It is an institution run by old men, most of whom seem to have an almost pathological determination to keep women out of positions of power, not to mention to deny them any kind of control over their reproductive capacities.

You could say that Catholics wish this fate upon themselves, although a desperate teen who finds herself pregnant may not recall actually filling out the Catholic application form. For that matter, millions of non-Catholic women all over the world are barred from access to birth control and abortion because they happen to live in countries where the Catholic Church is extremely influential.

The Church has never seemed concerned about its doctrines having spillover effects that control the lives of those outside its fold. (After all, it considers the Pope infallible.) To grant reverential treatment to such an institution, as if it is above the fray of politics, is puzzling.

The strangeness of the media’s approach was apparent in a front-page The Globe and Mail story, which revealed that an Australian archbishop addressing a World Youth Day event had described abortion as a worse moral scandal than priests abusing young people. This astonishing comment was buried beneath the vague headline “Schisms of theology run silent, run deep,” rather than a headline more to the point like: “Abortion worse than sex abuse: Archbishop.”

It was almost as if The Globe didn’t want to risk spoiling the celebratory mood by highlighting the fact that a senior figure in the Church had said something highly controversial — and, frankly, outrageous — to hundreds of young people.

For that matter, given the fact that “young people” were the focus of World Youth Day, it seemed odd that there was so little media reference to the sex abuse of young people and the Church’s long record of covering it up. (Not all young people in the Church are pilgrims; some are too busy recovering from traumatic encounters with their priests.)

The tone of the coverage was probably set last weekend when prominent Canadian media personality Rex Murphy wrote a column chastising Torontonians for grumbling about traffic jams during the Pope’s visit.

There was no such grumbling over traffic, he noted, during Britney Spears’ visit or when “every disease in the morbidity handbooks has one of its summer walk-a-thons or bicycle logjams.” Murphy argued that, unlike the manufactured celebrities on People magazine covers, the Pope is “a person of real consequence, real depth, real force.” (And those who spend hours trudging about the city streets to raise money for breast cancer or liver disease are just in it for the glamour?)

It may be that the Pope has more intellectual depth than Spears. But, it’s also true that there aren’t women dying of back alley abortions all over the world because of her.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...