The Lithuanian Christian radio Marijos Radijas has cut information about the public’s lack of confidence in the Church’s ability to deal with paedophilia cases from a rebroadcast of the Vatican Radio programme.
Giedrius Tamaševičius, a journalist and associate professor at Vilnius University, cooperates with Vatican Radio and provides it with reports on Church life in Lithuania. These are also rebroadcast by LRT KLASIKA and Marijos Radijas.
“The survey revealed that only one-fifth of the respondents trust the Church’s ability to investigate paedophilia cases on its own. [...] It was also found that in this group there are more people who visit the church once a week or more often,” Tamaševičius said in a report on the survey commissioned by LRT.
According to the survey, 20 percent of the population believes that the Catholic Church in Lithuania is capable of investigating possible cases of paedophilia in this institution. However, the majority of the respondents (69 percent) said they did not believe this because the Church tends to cover up such cases.
Further reading
However, no information about the public’s lack of trust in the Church was included in the rebroadcast on Marijos Radijas.
“The first broadcast on Sunday was aired in its entirety, but on Monday morning, the programme was deformed – part of the report was cut out,” Tamaševičius told LRT.lt.
The recording of the programme on the website of Marijos Radijas was also shortened.
“For some reason, they want to protect their listeners, as strange as it may seem these days. [...] It seems to me that this is a very telling fact,” the Vatican Radio contributor said.
According to Sigitas Jurkštas, Director of Programmes at Marijos Radijas, the radio reserves the right to decide what to broadcast, taking into account the reliability and accuracy of the news.
“We are not obliged to broadcast all the content provided by Vatican Radio,” he told LRT.lt.
He said that information about the public’s trust in the Catholic Church’s ability to investigate cases of paedophilia among priests was cut because “the appropriateness of this survey was questioned”.
“There is no doubt that the Church is not capable of solving criminal offences on its own, as this is the competence of law enforcement authorities. [...] Because of these doubts, it was decided not to contribute to the dissemination of the results of this survey on Marijos Radijas,” Jurkštas said.
More than censorship?
However, Paulius Subačius, a member of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Sciences and a professor at Vilnius University, thinks that the word “censorship” is too weak in this case. According to him, the exclusion of certain information from the Vatican Radio rebroadcast is a disregard for the Church’s main institution.
“It is a violation of any existing norms, both in the secular and even more so in the religious media. Vatican Radio is the official radio station of the Holy See and has full doctrinal oversight. [...] Any interference with the Vatican Radio work is, in my understanding, absolutely unacceptable,” Subačius told LRT.lt.
He was not convinced by the arguments about the reliability of the survey, which was reported by Vatican Radio.
“If the Vatican Radio information is unreliable in someone’s eyes, then those people should say directly that they do not trust the Holy See and its institutions in principle,” Subačius said.
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