Breaking news from Australia: The Papacy Returns to Italy!

On Thursday morning I learnt that white smoke was appearing, from a text message sent from England. At first I flicked between television channels. Among Australian terrestrial channels there was a live broadcast from St Peter's Square on Channel 7 Sunrise and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). I could also get Sky News, Fox News and CNN. The ABC seemed to have the cleanest picture (fewer annoying graphics) so I settled in to that channel. Then they hauled on Paul Collins, Papal historian and ex-priest. Men leave the priesthood for different reasons but my general experience is they are damaged goods. They are not a likely source of balanced and informative comment.

In 2001 Collins resigned from priestly ministry because of a dispute with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over his book Papal Power. 

In other words he left in a fit of pique.

ABC bias on euthanasia

A while ago somebody sent me a post on the MercatorNet blog, Careful! - a blog on euthanasia. It contained a video interview with Bishop Anthony Fisher op. The blog describes him as being "interviewed by a right-to-die activist." I suppose the post writer simply went by the content of the questions and drew the obvious conclusion. The interviewer, Quentin Dempster, is a journalist with the ABC and presumably has pretensions to neutrality. This was not extra-curricular activity. The interview was part of regular ABC programming. 

Bishop Fisher does a very good job dealing with the questions. Dempster is someone who describes obedience to the Fifth Commandment as hardline but as the folk at Careful! say, Bishop Fisher hits the questions right out of the park (in Australia, since you ask, we would say "hits them for six").