A Tale of Two Interviews: 60-Minutes and CBS Interview Pope Francis

I’ve come to hold a healthy skepticism when it comes to claims by media outlets that a celebrity actually said or did the thing they claim the celebrity did or said. That includes Pope Francis. I know too well how easy it is for them to alter video footage by deleting key portions of a statement or moving segments of audio and video to places where they didn’t actually belong.

That’s why I didn’t let my feathers get too ruffled when my husband came into my room the other day telling me I needed to listen to Pope Francis’s 60-Minutes interview. He was outraged by the things people were saying he said, particularly in regard to his unflattering statements about conservative Catholics.

Interesting Anamolies

In researching the 60-Minutes interview, which was a 13 minute and 38 second segment, I found the longer CBS interview which lasted 45 minutes. Almost everything that is in the 60-minutes interview is in the CBS interview, with some notable exceptions.

Most notable is what it appears that Pope Francis said starting at 5:10 into the 60-Minutes interview with Norah O’Donnell, when asked about the State of Texas moving to shut down a Catholic Charity providing humanitarian aide to undocumented migrants at the border between Mexico and El Paso.

Here’s what the 60-Minutes interview shows him answering:

“That is madness. Sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there? That is madness. The migrant has to be received. Thereafter, you see how you’re going to deal with them. Maybe you have to send them back. I don’t know. But each case ought to be considered humanely, right?”

It should be noted that this particular snippet about the possibility of sending them back was completely absent from the 45-minute long interview with CBS. Here’s what the 45-minute long interview with CBS (same interviewer) shows him answering:

 “That is madness. Sheer madness. Over there in Texas, there is a great Bishop, Bishop Sites. He is right there at the border. That man does the impossible to help the migrants, right?”

In that 45-minute interview, they also show him saying earlier:

 “The solution is migration. To open the doors to migration. For an immigration policy to be good, it must have four things: 1) For the migrant to be 1) received; 2) assisted; 3) promoted; and 4) integrated. This is what is most important. To integrate them into the new life.”

It’s clear, at least to me, that some monkeying was done with the actual interview footage. It’s hard to tell what the Pope actually said and in what context it was said when you have footage being manipulated.

At 9:12 into the 60-Minutes interview, she says to Pope Francis, “You have said who am I to judge? Homosexuality is not a crime.”

According to the interview footage (again, I have doubts about this), but here is what his response is recorded as being:

“No. It’s a human fact.”

Norah quickly switches to the next question, even though it’s clear he’s taken a breath and is preparing to say more. She asks, “There are conservative Bishops in the United States that oppose your new efforts to revisit teachings and traditions. How do you address their criticisms?”

The video shows him responding:

“You used an adjective, conservative. That is, conservative, one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude because one thig is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.”

This particular section was not included in the longer interview, and the implication is that Pope Francis does not consider homosexual behavior to be a crime (being homosexual is not a sin – acting on it is, just as being attracted to women is not a sin but sleeping with women you’re not married to is.)

However, in the longer interview, Pope Francis makes it very clear that he is not giving license to homosexual unions.

She asked him, “Last year, you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same sex couples. That’s a big change. Why?”

He is quick to clarify. “No. What I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not, that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way.”

Having watched both interviews in their entirety, I would bring up two very important points to consider before deciding how you address them:

1.   We do not have the raw footage, nor are we likely to be shown that. It’s hard to tell for sure what, exactly, the pope said and in what context it was said. Therefore, we need to proceed with extreme caution in discussing this interview.

2.   The Pope is more than capable of speaking in English. They specifically chose to interview him in Spanish, in spite of their largest audience being English speakers. That leaves us at the mercy of his translators. We can’t be sure that they are translating with 100% accuracy the pope’s intended words.

Before We Judge, We Must Be Sure We Have ALL the Facts

Before we make a judgment about what to do with these interviews, it’s important to consider that we don’t have all the facts. We weren’t there. We know what the media wants us to believe. But we don’t have all the facts, and it’s unlikely that we will.

Until we have all the facts, it’s unwise to judge. After all, we would – potentially – be engaging in false accusations. That is something we should avoid at all costs.