An entire country does not have a free press. It’s a bigger story than the one that we are pursuing. If that is not corruption, I do not know what is.

Today, the Italian press again failed to show up for the IMWAC session. I talked with Barbara Blaine, president of SNAP, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, and she told me that the Italian press showed up on Monday, when they stood outside St. Peter’s Square and decried the role of Cardinal Bernard Law in the special masses of remembrance for Pope John Paul II.

She told me: “As soon as they found out that we were talking about sexual abuse they said they could not cover it. They apologized but said that if they did a story, they would never be able to cover a story in Rome again. They were very apologetic. They have not been back.”

The international press has shown up.

Tony Padovano says that he has at least 25 international press organizations on the list he has accumulated in the past two days. Not a one of them is Italian. The Berlusconi connection is inescapable. Here is a man who is a media monopolist, with the control of the government-owned organs. They simply are not covering anything that would, in the slightest, alienate the church fathers. They have aligned themselves with those who would protect and cover up the crimes of pederasts. It is a scandal. An entire country does not have a free press. It’s a bigger story than the one that we are pursuing. If that is not corruption, I do not know what is.

Sister Joan Chittister made a powerful presentation that, as far as I could tell, mesmerized the female journalists. They stayed afterward to talk with her. They want to understand why the church continues to discriminate against women. They do not know the stories, the language of oppression that covers itself up with pious-sounding arguments. Having walked away from the institution themselves, they are puzzled by the convoluted reasoning. They don’t see the logic of repression, the roots of the woman-hating clerical excuses for continuing the discrimination.

These seminars truly are geared at educating the media. One cannot say that we are making news. We are creating an educational experience. I hope and pray that it will make a difference in the kinds of questions that they lob at the cardinals and bishops. When theological gobbledygook is thrown at them, they have an uneasy sense that they are being lied to, but they do not know enough to be able to actually identify the lies or the logical inconsistencies that characterize so much of the so-called “conservative” arguments in opposition to women serving as ordained ministers in the Catholic church.

Paul Collins arrived today. He is a delightful, articulate man with a great gift for the quip. I think he will do a good job with the press. The press release that I drafted for him practically wrote itself.

Tissa Balasuriya, the Sri Lankan priest who, a number of years ago was excommunicated because of his book on Mary, which was judged to be blasphemous, will arrive tomorrow for the lecture series. Balasuriya will go on after Collins makes his presentation. Collins will be brief. Tissa’s speech already runs 12 pages and we are wondering whether the press will hang around for all of it.