The Media Research Center continued its concern over how non-right-wingers are reacting to newly installed Pope Leo XIV with a May 14 column by Tim Graham:
Our secular news media only seems to view the church as a political force and how it affects their world. Right now, popes are considered good when they oppose (and hopefully shame) President Trump on poverty and immigration, and popes are bad when they oppose abortion and the invention of 57 genders.
It’s become obvious that our media deeply desire for Pope Leo to function as a staunch opponent of this president, when everyone knows a pope making any objection to “devout Catholic” President Biden would have been considered rude and unnecessary.
But this Holy Father is the patriarch of a global church, not a Speaker of the House. The most important matters to Catholics are the church matters, spreading the gospel of Jesus in the modern world while protecting an ancient deposit of faith. What seems irrelevant to outsiders, like the rumblings over the Traditional Latin Mass, are more internally important than unbelievers pushing the church on whether priests can be women or married men.
The secular scolds never seem to accept the argument that anyone who wants a married priest or a female priest can join the Episcopalians. There are 31 flavors of Protestantism, but the scolds want to force every church into their “progressive” mold.
Graham then wrote, without apparent self-awareness:
In his opening remarks to journalists, the pope had a request: “Let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred; let us free it from aggression. We do not need loud, forceful communication, but rather communication that is capable of listening,”
This is unsurprising from a religious leader, but many of us function in a media environment that is aggressively ideological and dismissive of listening to an opposing view. This is not just a test for the media, but for the media’s audience.
Graham didn’t mention that he is paid well to create and perpetuate a media environment that is aggressively ideological and dismissive of listening to an opposing view, and that he does so on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, Catherine Salgado used the new pope to play gotcha with AI engines:
What characteristics and priorities should the newly elected pope have? Opinions both in and outside the Catholic Church abound, but the bias and warped priorities programmed into artificial intelligence on this topic may leave even the most avid chatbot fan surprised.
MRC Free Speech America asked five different artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots “What characteristics should the next pope have?” and “Is Pope Leo XIV a good choice?” Grok and the Chinese government-promoted AI chatbot DeepSeek gave the most woke responses, describing an ideal pope as one who would incorporate the opinions of LGBTQ individuals, climate alarmists and those advocating for female priests. Meta AI, surprisingly, gave the shortest and least woke responses. MRC researchers additionally received responses from Microsoft Copilot and Google’s Gemini, which also displayed distinct biases. All of the chatbots, however, primarily evaluated Leo XIV not based on Catholic doctrine, but on leftist political goals, except DeepSeek, which denied the existence of a Leo XIV.
Comedy cop Alex Christy groused in a May 14 post that a non-right-wing priest appeared on late-night TV:
For Tuesday’s edition of The Late Show, CBS’s Stephen Colbert welcomed “Chaplain of the Colbert Nation” Father James Martin to discuss Pope Leo XIV. Both men agreed that one positive thing Leo brings to the papacy is that him being American will force President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to confront their immigration beliefs, with Colbert ultimately declaring, “He’ll go Inquisition on you. He’ll go Torquemada on you, baby.”
[…]Given his acceptance and promotion of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender ideology, Colbert should probably avoid bringing up the Inquisition and Torquemada, even if only jokingly.
The same day, Nicholas Fondacaro once again helmed the MRC’s podcast in Graham’s stead, huffing that the “liberal media” was getting “hyped about possibly using and abusing Pope Leo XIV as a cudgel against the political right in America” and had “repeatedly voiced their excitement to use him to browbeat President Trump and Vice President Vance on the issue of immigration.”