December 2025 Letter from the Provost

It has been said that we are living in a post-truth society. The dreaded Google’s artificial intelligence generator defines such a society as “one where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. In this society, disinformation and emotional arguments are used to manipulate public perception, often fuelled by social media, while the importance of expert testimony and factual evidence is diminished. This has led to a crisis of trust in institutions and a rise in populist politics that prioritises ideological narratives over deliberative principles.”

Recently the BBC was caught out badly after its current affairs documentary programme Panorama was revealed to have spliced together different parts of a speech by the President of the USA, broadcasting what looked like shocking and irrefutable proof that he had fomented a violent insurrection in Washington. The director general of the once esteemed corporation is among those who has had to resign, and Mr Trump is considering suing the corporation for billions of dollars. It has to be said that the BBC has long established form when it comes to such chicanery. In 2006 Panorama was condemned by senior members of the Catholic hierarchy in this country for cooking up false evidence which it claimed linked His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the cover-up of horrible sins of abuse within the Catholic Church. It is to be hoped that those who were surprised by the eventual acquittal of the Oratory’s good friend George Cardinal Pell by the Australian High Court after he had spent 404 days in jail following a worldwide trial by media on trumped up charges of the most horrendous crimes imaginable will have learnt a lesson about how much we can trust what we read and listen to. Those senior citizens who still bother to listen to the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media would do well to treat everything that they are fed with the highest level of circumspection, whether the subject matter be politics, religion, the climate, pandemics, healthcare, world affairs, or just about anything else.

The young seem largely to have abandoned the “legacy media” as a source of information. Many of them prefer to mine for their news in the whole plethora of independent resources available on the internet, which can carry its own hazards. There is nothing new about fake news, however. Ashley Rindsberg’s meticulously researched book The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History catalogues numerous misleading and sometimes dangerous narratives fabricated by America’s most renowned broadsheet, including the report in 1939 on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War that Poland had invaded Germany.

In Ecclesiastes 1:10 we are told: “Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us”, and this holds as much for fake news as for anything else. Reading the Gospels we see that Our Lord Himself was the victim of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by a religious leadership intent on His removal. Pilate might seem to us to have been ahead of his time when he asked, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38), but the fact is that our “post-truth society” was by then already long established. It was in fact inaugurated when Eve believed the serpent’s promise that she and Adam would be like gods and never die if only she took the forbidden fruit, foolishly forgetting that they had already been endowed with a supernatural likeness to the Creator along with the preternatural gift of immortality. No wonder Our Lord called the devil “the father of lies” and “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44).

So where are we to look for truth, and what sources of information can we rely upon when agenda-driven reporting in the media leads to downright mendacity, when the “scientific consensus” of this generation is liable to be debunked by the next, and when today’s “conspiracy theory” becomes tomorrow’s reality? Thankfully the God Who created us with a mind so that we can discern the truth and a will that enables us to carry out His purpose has provided us with one source of truth which is invincible. This is His divine Revelation. He Who can neither deceive nor be deceived has given us His inspired and inerrant word in Holy Scripture, and He has given to His Church the assurance that She will feed us with saving truth infallibly when Her bishops teach in unison with the successor of St Peter and in continuity with the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord entrusted to the Apostles.

This Advent we would do well to withdraw our attention from the noise of all the dubious narratives with which we are bombarded and to focus on the life-giving narrative of the Gospel, as we prepare to celebrate the inextinguishable light that entered the darkness of this world on that first Christmas in Bethlehem, when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Father Julian Large