The shock associated with the outbreak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic affected the lives of everyone-and religious communities were no exception. Closed churches, bans on public worship, ...cancelled events, rapid changes to pastoral modes-many of these stories, quite naturally, captured media interest. This study provides an analysis of the image of Christian churches (and in particular the Catholic Church, which is the largest and most influential) as presented in the media in Central Europe, more specifically, in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Through a content analysis based on the concepts of frames and topoi, the study focuses on how the media presented the activities of the churches and the relation between church and government authorities during the pandemic. Based on a sample of 491 media texts published over the period of five months (February-June 2020) in four mainstream secular print/online media, our conclusions point to a predominantly positive image of Christian churches in the media-with the churches being perceived as cooperative, creative, and responsible, pursuing the common good and offering a prophetic interpretation of a difficult situation. On the other hand, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and non-cooperation were presented by the Slovak and Czech media as phenomena more frequently happening in other countries.
The author analyses strong and weak points of the
Church media in Slovakia. Her conclusions are based on more than ten previous
researches in the field of Church and media, realized on the Catholic
...University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She states, that Slovak
church media are exclusively pastoral, wilfully resigning to the evangelization
function. Marginal evangelization attempts (such as in
Radio Lumen
in the late 1990s) have failed. This means, inter alia,
that they do not do journalism in its original sense. They act as public
relations bodies of the bishop’s conferences and as an extension of spiritual
service of the church to the believers. The competent decision-makers (i.e.
church hierarchy) are not willing to subsidize evangelization medium, because
the currently accepted doctrine is to use ‘their own’ media space to spread
‘their own’ messages. Thus, opening complex topics, covering opinion plurality
and encouraging discussion, is regarded as harmful. This function is, in the
last years, substituted by the commercial project of the
Conservative daily Postoj
, but this is neither a church nor
religious medium. As the researches show, also the request of believing audience
for independent critical Church medium is disputable. The audience is –
disregarding age – divided between the audience of the official church media
and decent secular media. Between these two groups exists a relatively strong
antagonism
The purpose of this study is to determine whether the media language code is suitable for transmitting religious messages. In religious media communication one observes a tendency not to respect the ...classical news values, and in fact tends to limit them. This approach makes religious media communication fail at the start. Using textual analysis and qualitative research techniques, e.g., focus groups and Delphi, we investigate some news values relate (positively or negatively) to the religious messages. Here we present three most expressive of them: conflict, scandalousness and story. If messages are formed by news values, then religious messages are formed by means of values that we named the gospel values, and can be identified with traditional Catholic Church virtues. Finding possible connections between the news values and the gospel values seems to be one of the basic solutions for the religious message media coding.
Repression and persecution by the totalitarian communist regimes have significantly affected the fates of Christian churches and believers in the countries of the “Eastern Bloc”. Many members of the ...clergy and laypersons were incarcerated, tortured and persecuted, several bishops suffered exemplary punishment in the propaganda-driven show trials and a few of them were later beatified or canonized across the world (by the Catholic Church). Focusing on the literature originating in Slovakia, this meta-report aimed to summarize the key authors’ essential works and to examine the question as to whether—and to what extent—faith was a contributing factor in the collapse of the communist regime. What was the role of the churches and believers in the struggle against communism? How and to what extent believers were involved in the resistance movements and the political and economic transformation of their countries that were set in motion by the collapse of those regimes? Based on an analysis of hundreds of books and articles on the subject, essential ideas were extracted, categorized and presented. The works of the persecuted authors were the subject of a detailed qualitative content analysis. Thus, four overarching dimensions (philosophical, intimate, personal and social/political) and fourteen categories related to the experience of faith were identified.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has led to the introduction of various epidemiological measures, including the ban on public worship. The problem of closed churches has become an intensely debated ...subject across several countries and a hotly debated question in recent media discourse. This paper provides an analysis of the arguments presented on the subject of closed churches by the media in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In addition to the detailed analysis of the argumentation used, it also presents a twofold comparison: arguments presented in liberal versus conservative media, and arguments presented in the Slovak media versus Czech media. Twenty-eight years ago, these two countries were part of one state and after the split, the countries became a model of a peaceful dissolution (the so-called ‘velvet divorce’). However, from a religious perspective, they are quite different: whereas Slovakia is one of the most Christian (Catholic) countries, the Czech Republic is one of the most atheist countries in Europe. Three research dimensions are presented as part of this study: (1) media argumentation on the problem of closed churches; (2) comparison of liberal versus conservative arguments; (3) comparison of the media coverage in a strongly Christian country versus a strongly atheist country.
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