Journalism should be `sacred duty'

Pope John Paul said yesterday that journalists should consider their work a sacred duty. He was addressing almost 8,000 journalists from around the world at the Vatican yesterday, on the final day of the Catholic Church's Jubilee of Journalists.

Journalism, he warned, could not be exclusively guided by economic forces, profit and vested interests.

In the course of a papal audience yesterday he also told the journalists that modern communication techniques "should be at the service of the common good, and in particular of the weak, the poor, the sick, children, and those marginalised or excluded by society".

He said that no liberty, including freedom of expression was absolute. "Neither should one claim a right to information without taking into account the rights of the individual," he said.

Earlier, the Vatican's president of the central committee for the jubilee, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, told the journalists in a homily during Mass that there had been predictions "that we are entering an era without journalists".

Such were the developments in modern communication techniques, he said, that in the eyes of public opinion, the "journalists' social mission is fading . . . .".Journalists, he added, should struggle against "the dictatorship of urgency".

Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the council for the promotion of Christian unity, asked that "those chosen and delegated to report on religion and religious events be especially formed for this delicate and important task. "No serious editor would send a reporter to write on politics or sport without making sure that the person chosen is well prepared to discuss and report on these matters. Why then do we sometimes meet reporters who come very poorly prepared to discuss with us religious questions?"

Cardinal Dario Hoyos, prefect of the congregation for the clergy, told the journalists that it was often isolated infidelity or the defection of committed people which made headlines while daily heroism did not make news at all.

Christ, he said, was "the journalist par excellence, the greatest journalist of history, whose parables of daily life, with simplicity, could explain the great realities".