Why Read Propaganda?

By Thomas Creen, MJ • Lviv, Ukraine

Being now assigned to our Miles Jesu community in Lviv, Ukraine, it’s important for me to read up on the history of Ukraine. There is information I found on the Internet about the charming church and residence that Miles Jesu has in Lviv. I was one of the first ones from Miles Jesu to come to Ukraine in 1990, so it was kind of funny to see statements on some sites saying, “An Irish monk named Tom was a founder of the Ukrainian branch of Miles Jesu.” There’s some truth in that statement and some inaccuracy, too.

Similarly, at another time while I was teaching in Phoenix, it happened that a guest of mine accidentally pulled the fire alarm in my classroom. Within about two minutes, someone had posted on a social networking site that the one who pulled the alarm was me and that, apparently, I didn’t know the difference between a light switch and a fire alarm. I thought that was a good remark and I appreciated the humor. It was also valuable for me to be lied about on the Internet. It made me feel important.

Having my personal experiences in mind, it is kind of humorous to witness so much trickery constantly going on in the news media. A lot of it reminds me of Soviet propaganda. The deeper one looked into it, the more one would see that if the Soviet press hated someone, oftentimes that person wasn’t so bad, and if it loved someone, that person was usually pretty messed up.

I read a lot of news on the Internet. But the words of St. Anthony Mary Claret, the spiritual father of Miles Jesu, come to mind sometimes. He wrote in his autobiography, “I don’t care for reading newspapers. I prefer reading a chapter from the Holy Bible, in which I can read the truth, to reading newspapers, which are ordinarily full of lies and trivia.”

He died in 1870. The news business as a whole hasn’t evolved much in 150 years. Never too late.

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