How to silence a Cardinal
South Africa's Cardinal Wilfred Napier seems to have got himself into a spot of bother. Interviewed by the leftist BBC he suggested that paedophilia wasn't a crime but a sickness....or, at least, that's how it came over.
Now anybody with even a passing acquaintance with the media will know that there is such a thing as editing. This means that a half hour interview with Cardinal Napier will probably be reduced to five or ten minutes. Those five or ten minutes need to be as spicy as possible because, let's face it, even the BBC has competition these days and the challenge is to grab the public's attention in as sensational manner as possible.
What better, in the week a new Pope is elected, than a senior member of the Roman Catholic church appearing to defend one of the sins the church is frequently accused of? Better still, the guy doing the defending is from South Africa which suggests that this country doesn't take sex crimes against children seriously. After all, if some reports are to be believed, a third of our "girl children" (dreadful expression) get pregnant at school and a substantial percentage are HIV positive.
Not surprisingly there was an outcry over Napier's comments and the unfortunate Cardinal was thrown to the hyenas. These days you can measure the immediate effect of a comment like Cardinal Napier's on Twitter. Predictably the usual suspects took to their computer keyboards to express their disgust at Napier's comments without even bothering to consider whether they were taken out of context or edited for effect. The hate campaign gathered pace and eventually Napier was forced to apologise for his comments.
Being "forced" to apologise for something you have allegedly said or done is one of the great triumphs of our modern age. It gives what I like to refer to as the "gibbering classes" a sense of power in their otherwise empty lives. It doesn't matter how crass or uninformed their comments are on Twitter providing they contribute to a mob frenzy and force that apology.