Wanna know what Prague’s Catholic cardinal REALLY thinks?

“Context is everything.”

I remember seeing that pithy little maxim on a Globe and Mail bus shelter poster not long after 9/11. The ad featured a shot of the Statue of Liberty with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, as if to taunt passersby to shout out, “Lady Liberty, how dare you!”

Istanbul (javier.losa flickr cc)

The ad made it’s point well. It also didn’t hurt to make that kind of visual statement on the corner of Dunbar and 16th Avenue – the posh west side of Vancouver – where a comfortable anti-Americanism abides as close to the surface as a passion for German automotive engineering.

As a journalist with a background in theology, I often find myself thinking back to that poster, and how context really is everything. It’s why religion is inherently difficult to cover in the news. Difficult, abstruse histories and scriptural squabbles don’t really lend themselves to quick graphs and catchy phrases. To a person on the street, it doesn’t really make a lick of sense that a word like filioque could divide Christendom East and West, or how a 1300+ year-old succession story could separate Sunni and Shia. How do you really explain those kinds of things?

It’s also why I bristle whenever I see words like “Vatican” or “Islamic extremism” in the world pages of a local paper. Today’s Vancouver Sun features a Daily Telegraph story by Simon Caldwell, “Europe’s secular society gives Muslims the upper hand, Catholic cardinal says.”

There’s nothing wrong with the story, as I can see it, but it makes me wonder what it means to Vancouverites to have a British journalist condensing an interview with a Czech archbishop reflecting on recent trends for two major world religions in an evolving European society. That’s a LOT of necessary context, and less than 400 words. Perhaps something gets lost along the way to Lotus land?

After all, context is everything.

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