“Sorry, er, what’s the story?” asked a young woman in a bored voice. The story? Thrown slightly off course, I stuttered that the CCN was right in the thick of things, fielding calls from what seemed like every media organisation in the country – and BBC stations I’d never even heard of. She was unimpressed and suggested I phone back later. I felt I might as well have been phoning to tell her I was from a PR company in Cornwall and that we had just won an account to raise the profile of cats-eyes.

This anecdote – it could be from a Drop the Dead Donkey script – illustrates the attitude of many journalists and broadcasters to the Catholic Church as well as some of the problems the Church has in overcoming often deeply ingrained prejudices among non-religious media professionals. A healthy scepticism is fine, but I can’t help wondering if many of those occupying key positions in the media are influenced by unhappy adolescent experiences of religion. You have to ask: Why is there so much criticism of Christianity and yet an uncritical acceptance of everything from “scientists say” stories to Californian psycho babble? Yes, religion has been used as an excuse for promoting hate, exploitation, war, or terrorism, and it can produce bigotry. So wouldn’t it make sense to attempt to understand the faith and beliefs that underpin all of this?

Of course, the world’s media – apart from PR Week, that is – recognised that the death of John Paul and the election of a new Pope was a massive story (I first heard about the Pope’s death not from the Vatican, but from a Sky News journalist who phoned me on the CCN out-of-hours phone while I was in a taxi crossing Tower Bridge). They understood that while the Papacy is primarily a spiritual institution, it has a far-reaching political dimension.

Decisions made in the Vatican affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The Catholic Church is the world’s biggest nongovernmental organisation and is, as many journalists in other countries know, on the front line of the fight for social justice. And as John Paul demonstrated, the Papacy can play a key role in changing the contours of the world political map. Of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, 70 per cent live in so-called developing countries, so the Church will continue to be a major player on the international stage as the 21st century grapples with everything from war and terrorism to bio-ethics and globalisation.

Yet more often than not the British media prefer to peddle a stereotypical, cynical and biased version of Catholicism, occasionally laced with a hint of “No Popery here”. Look at the hysterical reaction when the news broke that education secretary Ruth Kelly was a member of Opus Dei. Editors couldn’t handle the fact that a highly intelligent woman had chosen to join an organisation that supports orthodox Catholic teaching. Would we have seen the same hysteria if she had said she was gay? And many in the media were equally stumped by the box-office success of The Passion of the Christ. The British media, with its evangelical secularism, tends to strip out Catholicism’s spiritual and theological roots, which define it, and reduce it to an archaic organisation whose message is no abortion, no contraception, no sex outside marriage, no homosexual sex, no divorce and no euthanasia. Rarely do editors and reporters attempt to take the Church seriously and try to understand and explain why it teaches what it does.

In March, the CCN held a press conference at its Eccleston Square, London, headquarters to launch the bishops’ traditional general election letter. Only nine journalists turned up, most of whom were working for Catholic publications. Yet following Michael Howard’s call for a reduction in the time-limits for abortion, comments by Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor to a broadsheet journalist about how abortion should be seen as a political issue were splashed across front pages the following day. The bishops’ letter covered not just abortion but also marriage and the family, criminal justice, education, the global debt, foreign aid and trade. These other issues, however, were ignored, once again reinforcing the stereotype of a Church concerned only with biology and the bedroom and not with the complexity of modern life.

Of course, no reasonable Catholic is going to deny that the Church’s record in putting into practice the commands of Christ is far from unblemished. The widely reported sexual abuse scandals have done little to bolster the Church’s claim to be the planet’s spiritual and moral guide. But you don’t dismiss the idea of education because of bad teachers or failing schools.

That the Church has an ambivalent relationship with the media is to be expected: news values do not always equal gospel values. At the heart of Catholic teaching is the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have a dignity, human rights and responsibilities. Last year, BBC3 controller Stuart Murphy pulled the plug on the controversial cartoon comedy Popetown after Birmingham Archbishop Vincent Nichols protested to Director-General Mark Thompson, himself a Catholic, that the programme would be offensive to Catholics, and suggested that the Corporation wouldn’t air a similar programme about Jews or Muslims.

Clichéd broadcasting

The CCN is the latest incarnation of the Church’s media arm. At one time, the Church operated a TV studio and, until four years ago, when it was known as the Catholic Media Office and headed by a priest (who once made the front page of The Independent for describing a treatment centre for priests as a “spiritual boot camp”), also a radio studio. Now led by Rob McLoughlin, who boasts not only a distinguished career at Granada Television but also runs his own communications and production companies, the CCN acts as the mouthpiece for the Conference – the Church’s national bureaucracy, consisting of departments, such as Christian Life and Worship and International Affairs, and agencies, such as the Catholic Education Service. Cafod, the foreign aid and education arm, runs its own media team. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor has his own full-time press secretary as well as a special advisor, Sir Stephen Wall, who formerly worked alongside Tony Blair.

The CCN’s team of five has the task of providing information about the Church, which includes everything from the number of baptisms last year and the difference between a friar and a monk, to supplying the patron saint of florists (Therese of Lisieux, since you ask) or what kind of Latin prayers were used in Tudor England.

The dramatic events in Rome – the conclave was the ultimate Big Brother – led not just to countless requests from Sky News, BBC News 24, ITN and CNN for presenters’ “friends”, but also requests from talkSPORT and Yoga magazine for comments on Pope John Paul’s legacy. We worked hard to provide a diverse and fresh list of interviewees that reflected the cosmopolitan (there are around 30 ethnic chaplaincies, including Lebanese, Croats, Ethiopians and Vietnamese) and socially-mixed Catholic population. And we also tried to scotch the myths that a) the Church consists only of middle-class men in suits, or b) is under the clandestine leadership of Ann Widdecombe. There were raised eyebrows in the office when the News of the World phoned and asked for a 1,000-word tribute from Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff. I ghosted it, with a brief of “episcopal and tabloid”. (It was never used.) To meet the needs of the British journalists in Rome we established an office at the English College, which has been training priests since the 16th century.

The CCN also has to identify stories that might have legs for the national media, particularly for the small band of national religious affairs correspondents, and for the Catholic media. Despite falling attendance at Mass (only one in four Catholics in England and Wales go regularly to church), the Catholic community is still served by four weekly publications, all independent: the Catholic Herald, where once Martin Newland, Peter Stanford and Christina Odone sat in its cramped office hunched over the Catholic Directory; The Universe, where Mark Lawson used to leave his jacket on the back of his chair to give the impression he was in the building; The Catholic Times, whose letters page would result in mass arrests of some of its readers if it was published in China; and The Tablet, which manages to persuade leading political figures to bash away at a keyboard for the price of a meal for two at Pizza Hut. The Tablet, which not only has a first-class reputation around the world for thought-provoking, challenging and well-written stories, but is also, allegedly, read by Frank Skinner, is bucking the national trend for falling sales, with its average weekly circulation figure up from 18,700 in 1995 to 22,200 in 2005.

Throughout its history the Catholic Church has utilised various modes of communication: oral tradition, medieval manuscripts and, of course, the Bible. The Second Vatican Council issued a document on the role of the media and in 1968 Pope Paul VI added World Communications Day to the liturgical calendar. Pope John Paul II understood the role the media plays in transmitting human values and saw its potential as a tool of evangelisation, social justice and education. Having once toyed with the idea of being an actor, from the outset of his pontificate he began staging well-choreographed liturgies in spectacular locations around the world. He was a photographer’s dream. During his pontificate, he established the Vatican website and a TV centre, and restructured the Vatican press office, putting it in the charge of Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a former doctor and foreign correspondent for the Madrid daily ABC. Vatican Radio, set up as long ago as 1931, now broadcasts programmes in 37 languages and employs more than 400 staff.

Unashamedly orthodox

While there are those who would like to see a Catholic TV station in Britain, it seems unlikely to happen, due not just to the cost involved but also because of what some bishops would see as promoting a kind of ghetto Catholicism. There are a number of evangelical TV and radio stations broadcasting in or to the UK, such as the God Channel, Premier Radio and Cross Rhythms. But they have limited appeal to those not in the pews. The Catholic Church is learning how to make better use of Britain’s local radio stations, where producers, not being part of the Hampstead-Holland Park- Notting Hill axis, recognise that religion still plays an important part in community life. Denis Blackledge, a Jesuit, who presents an hour-long Sunday morning programme on BBC Radio Lancashire, is one of a growing number of Catholics on the airwaves.

But back to the events in St Peter’s Square in April. Why did those crowds – mostly young – pack the streets of Rome for the funeral of an elderly Pole who, we were told, was authoritarian, anti-sex, anti-women and out of tune with modern culture? Why did everyone from George W Bush and Tony Blair to the leaders of Israel and Iran turn up? Why did 6,000 journalists and other media personnel queue for accreditation at the Vatican press office? Why did 137 TV networks from 81 countries broadcast the requiem mass live? And why did Pope John Paul’s death touch hundreds of millions – not just Catholics – across every continent? The answer is because the Catholic faith, for all its murky chapters, has important things to say about the kind of society we live in and seeks to answer the big questions in life – questions about human origins, personal fulfilment, power, sex, money, justice, suffering and death. It proposes rather than imposes and dares to suggest that ancient cultures might have something to teach an increasingly restless and rootless modern age.

Pope Benedict XVI has not shied away from the media during his career in the Church, despite often being vilified as the Vatican’s rottweiler. An intellectual heavyweight with a common touch, he has published many books and given numerous interviews, most recently in the Italian daily La Republica, where he argued that Europe needed to abandon secularism and return to its Christian roots. On the Saturday after his election, he spoke to several thousand journalists in the Pope Paul VI Hall. He thanked them for their hard work during the papal transition and spoke of the need to possess “clear references of the ethical responsibilities” and to engage in a “sincere search for the truth and the safeguarding of the centrality and the dignity of the person”. We can be sure that the role of the media in society will figure prominently in his pontificate. What is less certain is whether the media in Britain will listen.