The Times on Pope Francis and abortion: the worst piece of religious reporting ever?

The headline on page 33 of today’s Times reads: ‘Repent and we will forgive abortions, Pope tells women’. It’s a bad headline, because the Church already grants absolution to women who repent of their abortions. CNN did much better: ‘Pope Francis says all priests can forgive women who’ve had abortions’. (In fact, the Church teaches that God does the forgiving, but ‘priests can forgive women’ is OK as shorthand.)

That said, headlines aren’t written by reporters, so you’d expect the Times article to set the record straight. On the contrary: Tom Kington, the author, litters his piece with ignorant misrepresentations of Francis’s ruling. When you consider what a sensitive subject this is, and that the Pope’s announcement has implications for a community of more than a billion people, that’s indefensible.

I’m going to fisk bits of his report. (Note to non-British readers: ‘fisking’ means interrupting a dodgy article with criticisms. It’s named after Robert Fisk, a British war reporter whose more, ahem, imaginative articles cry out for line-by-line exegesis.