St. Paul...and the newspapers!

For the Catholic Church today is a great feast day as we celebrate the conversion of St. Paul.
His name was Saul before his conversion, and he was a devout and zealous Jew, fearlessly defending the Jewish faith. In the years before his conversion he had been in charge of organising the slaughter of thousands of Christians, whom he dispised as he believed they were a pagan sect and were the work of Satan.
Saul was on the way to Damascus, where he was planning on continuing the murder of more Christians, when...well, let's hear it from St. Paul himself:

“On that journey as I drew near to Damascus,
about noon a great light from the sky suddenly shone around me.
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me,
‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’
I replied, ‘Who are you, sir?’

And he said to me,
‘I am Jesus the Nazorean whom you are persecuting.’My companions saw the light
but did not hear the voice of the one who spoke to me.
I asked, ‘What shall I do, sir?’
The Lord answered me, ‘Get up and go into Damascus,
and there you will be told about everything
appointed for you to do.’ Since I could see nothing because of the brightness of that light,
I was led by hand by my companions and entered Damascus.

“A certain Ananias, a devout observer of the law,
and highly spoken of by all the Jews who lived there,
came to me and stood there and said,
‘Saul, my brother, regain your sight.’
And at that very moment I regained my sight and saw him.
Then he said,
‘The God of our ancestors designated you to know his will,
to see the Righteous One, and to hear the sound of his voice;
for you will be his witness before all
to what you have seen and heard.
Now, why delay?
Get up and have yourself baptized and your sins washed away,
calling upon his name.’”



Then St. Paul became one of the greatest ever defenders and propagators of Christ's Truth and Good News!

Praise God!


This afternoon while in the student's common room at our Clinical School I started mindlessly flicking through one of the newspapers on a table and I came to a big picture of St. Paul on a double page spread about him!
I got really excited and was very surprised that they had ANYTHING on St. Paul in 'The Guardian', a notoriously ANTI-ANTI-ANTI-Catholic paper that I really dislike.
But anyway, I read the first paragraph of the article...it started off something like:

"Yesterday all over the world the Catholic Church celebrated the feast of St. Paul's conversion.
As the extremely right-wing Pope Benedict celebrated mass in the Vatican yesterday in memory of this event ....etc etc."

I gave up reading, I couldn't be bothered to read what they had to say (I think the article was about a theatre play someone has done about St. Paul).

But basically within about 3 lines the article mentioned at least twice that (apparently) YESTERDAY was the Catholic Feast Day of St. Paul's conversion.....when in actual fact it was today.

It seems like a small point but I think it actually says a lot.

I mean, if they can't even get a simple fact like the DATE of this feast right, then it's no wonder that whenever they report anything about the Catholic Church they always get it wrong; their articles are completely unrepresentative of the Church's position, or just plain incorrect about what the Church actually teaches.

Shows that they actually aren't bothered about getting their facts straight....just whatever sells a story and furthers their agenda.

not really surprising, but sad none-the-less.