BBC bias

Oh well, all that time travelling meant very little was done here...

Yesterday saw the announcement of the Catholic Church's response the requests of Anglicans from different parts of the world to eneter into full communion with the Church. It is a very generous response, sensitive to their needs and difficulties. There has been a fair amount in the British press about this.

This evening I wrote a complaint to the BBC concerning an on-line article written by Robert Piggott which can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8318663.stm

This is what I wrote:

'The article suggests that what the Catholic Church has proposed is "fishing". It makes no reference at all to what the statements explicitly stated - that the whole proposal is a response to the requests of large numbers of disaffected Anglicans and their Bishops - for example, the worldwide group known as the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), whose numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, and also some Church of England bishops as well. Thus the article's emphasis rests on an assertion that this is just fishing, or we might say a kind of poaching. The very fact that it mentions the question of archbishop's representative in Rome, Bishop David Richardson who asks why such a proposal should be put forward at this time, suggests that this proposal is opportunistic in the midst of Anglican difficulties. The answer to this question really rests in the already publicised advances and requests of TAC and other Anglican bishops. The fact that this is not mentioned renders this article defective.
'The article suggests also that the language used would strike most people as "complete gobbledygook". But by saying this it suggests that the language is indeed gobbeldygook - but it isn't: anyone trained in Catholic canon law and many Anglican parish priests and those working in the military would see parallels in the Military Ordinariates that the Catholic Church already has for military chaplaincy. Furthermore, the Catholic Church already has groups of former Anglicans using Anglican-style rites in the United States (why wasn't this mentioned in a supposedly balanced and factual article?).
'Lastly the article ends with a most surprising, emotive and unsupported assertion: "It gave the misleading impression of institutions that were out of touch and irrelevant to the lives of the many unattached but spiritually hungry people whom the churches need to attract." Though it uses the word "misleading" this is a clearly biased statement. It could be argued that in fact the proposed provisions are indeed an answer to spiritually hungry people who are looking for a true home, a Catholic home, outside of the disturbing and upsetting divisions of Anglicans. Why wasn't this mentioned to show that indeed such an impression would be misleading?
'I would propose that this article by Robert Piggott should at the very least be substantially corrected and rewritten or, better, removed.'