Madeleine McCann: rite and wrong


As the Madeleine McCann story endured, I spoke to reporters who said: “If she was black, or poor, or…” and gave that slightly embarrassed look that journalists give one another on stories like this, hoping for an acknowledgement.

There’s not much to inform, educate or entertain about child abduction. And this isn’t just a case study in how to manage the media in extremis.

So how do we rationalise the attention? Is there something in the story that somehow we’re missing? Because we are missing something, and that something is opportunity.

The story of Madeleine McCann is an opportunity, not for journalists, but for the public – or at least a large section of them: to express their solidarity with the McCanns and with one another; to hope, however vainly, with Madeleine’s parents for a miracle; and to affirm the wrongness and evil of harming children.

No one doubts the importance of collective acknowledgement of loss in war on Remembrance Day. The BBC doesn’t apologise for its broadcasting of state occasions.

And yet – here we are, priests of a self-invented church, unbelieving celebrants of a ritual that is somehow filling the aisles with believers, inviting us too to believe.

Then the rite is over. The church empties. We have ourselves to talk to once again.


One response to “Madeleine McCann: rite and wrong”

  1. There is so much talk about the mcCaans and how everyone is so sorry for them. And how evil the abductor is. Has enybody stopped to question the ethics of the parents to have left the toddlers alone? has anybody thought about the plight of the little girl, instead of harping over the ‘anguish’ and ‘distraught’ parents. Atleast they are together as a family. What about Maddie????