BBC's Sex and the Holy City

BBC Panorama’s Sex and the Holy City, revisited

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It is just over ten years ago now that the BBC broadcast one of its most biased and dishonest programmes on Catholic moral teaching to date.  The Panorama programme was Sex and the Holy City. Broadcast on 12^th October 2003, it purported to be an appraisal of 25 years of John Paul II’s pontificate, but was actually designed to do as much damage to the Pope and the Catholic Church’s moral teaching as possible. The BBC knows its strengths on the world media stage, and according to ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken it is massively self-confident when it come to promoting liberal moral values.

Sex and the Holy City created in 2003/04 the same kind of multi-level media discourse as the BBC had earlier (in the 1960s) created in favour of legalising abortion and homosexuality. Sex and the Holy City was an attack on the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception. Concentrating – though not exclusively - on the condom, the BBC blamed the Catholic Church for causing the AIDS crisis in Africa among other things. This encouraged other media outlets and pundits to join the attack on the Church. Many lay people changed their views as a result of this programme, and even some of our hierarchy faltered. But this satanic inspired attack was a breathtaking piece of mendacity by the programme’s producer Chris Woods and its reporter Steve Bradshaw, both of whom demonstrate an extremely strong left-liberal bias. Aitken also points out the link between the BBC’s Sexwise programme and its partnership with the IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation), contrasting this link with the requirement for the BBC to be impartial. BBC’s Sexwise is a programme that promotes abortion, contraception and homosexual activity.

Robin Aitken in his book Can we still trust the BBC? called Chris Woods’ impartiality into question, and thus the integrity of the whole documentary. Chris Woods had a history of anti-Catholic actions. He was also homosexual and a member of Outrage. He had been a journalist for homosexual publications such as Capital Gay, The Pink Paper and The Advocate. Woods and Outrage had identified the Catholic Church for attacks because of her strong stand on traditional family values. Woods and Outrage had ransacked the papal nuncio’s house in London and disrupted one of Cardinal Hume’s Masses in Westminster Cathedral. This was homosexuals trying to bully the Catholic Church into changing her laws on contraception, for they know full well that to do so would justify sex as a purely recreational activity, therefore ultimately justify homosexual activity. He and the BBC had the audacity to use their powerful position on the world stage to attack the Catholic Church and were quite prepared to engage in deceit to do so.

Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, then prefect of the Congregation for the Family, was interviewed for Sex and the Holy City. Upon seeing the programme he was extremely surprised by its bias, and wrote an excellent response. His Vatican document was called Safe Sex versus Family Values. In it he presented conclusive evidence that Catholic countries around the world have far fewer AIDS cases, while those countries that have adopted the condom have the most. Here is a striking piece of evidence from Safe Sex versus Family Values which shows how dangerous it is to rely on condoms to protect against AIDS. Safe Sex versus Family Values states, “In Thailand and in the Philippines, the first HIV/AIDS cases were reported in 1984; by 1987, Thailand had 112 cases while the Philippines had more with 135 cases Today, in the year 2003 there are around 750,000 cases in Thailand, where the 100% Condom Use Program had relatively great success. On the other hand, there are only 1,935 cases in the Philippines – and this considering that the Philippines’ population is around 30% greater that Thailand’s” - conclusive evidence that relying on the condom is killing people, while the Catholic Church’s support of abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it is being very successful.

How did the BBC react to this conclusive piece of evidence? As champions of liberal morality they reacted as one would expect, with omissions and bias, of course. The BBC and Panorama gave the evidence of Safe Sex versus Family Values little or no publicity, but brought out yet another Panorama programme called Can Condoms Kill? where they interviewed EU politicians and sex workers. One EU politician even went so far as to state that members of the Catholic hierarchy who support abstinence and not condoms should be tried for crimes against humanity. This was again picked up by various media outlets, and with the growing influence of the BBC, worldwide opinion was now at odds with the Catholic Church. We now have a worldwide situation developing whereby the BBC along with the United Nations is in complete opposition to the Catholic Church regarding morality. The anti-Gospel versus the Gospel.

Others have also questioned the use of condoms as safe. Dr Helen Singer-Kaplan, of Cornell University Medical Centre, states that “Counting on condoms is flirting with death.” The Journal of the American Medical Association states that ‘“Understandably, for practical and ethical reasons few studies have actually used live couples to test HIV transmission rates”; however, a University of Miami Medical School study showed that three out of 10 women whose HIV-infected husbands faithfully used condoms contracted AIDS-Related Complex (ARC) in an 18 month period. This translates into an infection rate of 21 percent per year ... and 91% over 10 years.’ One Lancet (Feb 7 1987 page 323) article says ... ‘“Safe Sex” ... Condoms has a substantial failure rate: 13-15% of women whose male partners use condoms as the sole method of contraception become pregnant within one year ‘

Conclusive evidence in favour of Catholic moral teachings: but how does the BBC describe Catholic moral teaching? -  by using expressions and words like “hardliners in the Vatican say condoms can kill”. In Can We Still Trust the BBC? Chapter 11, “The Moral Maze”, Robin Aitken quotes the work of David Kerr, ex-BBC Assistant Editor. Kerr carried out a study of the BBC’s proclaimed impartiality, and used its treatment of the Catholic Church in Sex and the Holy City as an example. In Kerr’s independent study of Sex and the Holy City and the Catholic Church he appears to find in the Church’s favour in point after point.

  

The People of the Philippines who have been so loyal to the teachings of the Catholic Church and proved the BBC wrong, now need our help please see this link for donations to Aid to the Church in Need’s appeal to help the Philippines after the devastating typhoon. Click on this link ACN