Top 5 "over-covered" (read: wrong) Vatican stories of the year

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No. 2: The Pope on evolution
On Oct. 27, Francis spoke to the Academy of Sciences and said “evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of creation,” adding that God is not a “magician” who creates with a “magic wand.”

The statement was hailed as revolutionary, until people hit Google and found citations demonstrating that popes had been saying the exact same thing since Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis in 1950. John Paul II famously called evolution “more than a hypothesis.”

The moral here is, just because some people are paying attention to a pope for the first time does not make everything he does a first.

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No. 1: Pets in heaven
The winner by a country mile, this story got started on Nov. 27 when Francis gave a talk about redemption and said it means “the bringing of all things into the fullness of being.”

An Italian newspaper speculated that perhaps Francis meant to include pets in that judgment, and quoted a famous line from Pope Paul VI to a boy who had lost his dog that “we will see our animals again in heaven.”

As the story made its way into English, it came to seem as if Francis had been the one to speak the line to the distraught boy, and from there it was a short leap to styling it as another example of a maverick pontiff breaking the mold.

Once again, a great story with the small flaw of being factually wrong.

If you’ve got some time over the holidays, you might think about organizing a fantasy league for potential over-played Vatican stories to come in 2015. Alas, there’s no shortage of draft prospects.

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On Christmas Day Francis turned his ire to the world, blasting it for “complicit silence” and a “globalization of indifference” to a whole laundry list of ills, beginning with the abuse and exploitation of children and the “brutal persecution” currently underway in Iraq and Syria.

The pope became visibly emotional discussing the suffering of children, saying, “Truly there are so many tears this Christmas, which join the tears of the child Jesus.”

Media coverage of both performances was enthusiastic. The Curia speech was hailed as a reformer speaking truth to power, while the Urbi et Orbi was seen as a classic statement of Francis’ compassion.

While the speeches were masterfully crafted to ring bells, it’s worth pausing for a moment to ponder how reaction might have played out if it had been a different pope who said these things — for instance, had it been Pope Benedict XVI.

(For the record, Benedict easily could have given either speech. In 2005, he famously penned a Good Friday meditation about the need to confront the “filth” in the Church, and of course he suffered through the tawdry Vatican leaks affair, so he yields to no one in grasping the need for a housecleaning. He’s also passionate about the suffering of innocents and social justice, in part reflecting a family legacy of involvement in populist Bavarian farmer and labor movements in the 19th century.)

Had it been Benedict XVI, there’s a good chance the take-away might have been, “What a downer!”

Images of a tired, isolated, and defensive pope offering an increasingly bleak and hopeless diagnosis might have been framed, and it’s not much of a leap to imagine words such as “apocalyptic” and “pessimistic” featuring prominently in much commentary.

Yet because few people are inclined to see Francis in those terms, even his harsh rhetoric somehow comes off as uplifting and inspiring.

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