When the fatal stabbing of Brother Roger of Taizé by a mentally disturbed Romanian woman was announced on RTÉ radio late last Tuesday, it was striking to see how few other media outlets had the story. An internet search of Reuters, Associated Press and even the BBC revealed nothing, although the Australian Associated Press was covering it, writes Breda O'Brien.
Meanwhile, over on Sky News, they were running with an extended feature on how Madonna had fallen off a horse, and broken ribs and a collarbone. Somehow, it said it all.
Brother Roger Schutz, one of the most inspiring figures of the 20th century, beloved by Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, had just been fatally stabbed, but Sky News was running with a story about a pop star who had broken bones.
It was proof that, despite their claim to be at the cutting edge, sometimes the media are out of touch.
This was not the first time Brother Roger failed to make headlines. Remember the furore caused when President McAleese received Communion in a Protestant church? Yet one of the first people to receive communion at the funeral of Pope John Paul from the soon-to-be Pope Benedict was a frail figure wrapped in a blanket in a wheelchair.
It was the same Brother Roger Schutz. Nothing too odd about that, you might say, except Brother Roger was a Lutheran. Here was the alleged rottweiler of Catholic orthodoxy giving Communion to a Lutheran, yet it received almost no coverage in English language media.
It did cause a lot of discussion on weblogs on the internet. When some of the "bloggers" sent e-mails to Taizé to ask if Brother Roger had converted to Catholicism, they received polite but enigmatic replies that left them no wiser as to whether he had or not.
The fact is, he probably did not convert. He himself often said that he had had a "Catholic soul" from the time his grandmother, from a family which had been Protestant for more than four centuries, started to receive communion in a Catholic church. She did so because she had three French sons fighting the Germans during the first World War, and she could no longer bear the divisions among Christians in Europe.
Despite that profound influence, Brother Roger said he believed that the "church is far more extensive than we can imagine. We are far from sounding its breadth, height and depth."
What is far more likely is that Pope Benedict judged that this was a man who had a deeply Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, despite remaining within his own tradition.
Brother Roger rarely gave interviews and deliberately discouraged a cult of personality. Perhaps that he is why he operated "under the radar" of the media. In fact, he lacked most of the requirements of a popular media hero.
He was not a strikingly handsome figure. He was not a great orator, though young people hung on his every word. His central message could be boiled down to a few phrases, such as "Love, and say it by your life".
He did not court controversy, but attempted in a concrete way to heal the divisions within Christianity, first by having Protestant and Catholic men live together as vowed celibates in community, and in later years, by reaching out in particular to the Orthodox Church.
We live in a time where the "heroes" presented to us by the media are the likes of Paris Hilton, famous for being rich, for a dodgy video, and not much else. We gleefully devour the sordid details of the lives of so-called celebs, and there seems to be an endless market for reading about their woes, everything from cellulite to unfaithful partners.
Taizé, the ecumenical monastery set up by Brother Roger in the 1940s, is in stark contrast to all of that. For decades, Taizé has been a magnet for young people.
It attracts roughly 5,000 a week during the summer and far more at Easter. I went there during the 1980s. Even then, it made no sense that so many young people travelled there from all around the world, ranging from the deeply committed to a healthy quota of the openly sceptical and agnostic.
Bells summoned you to prayer three times a day, and much of the rest of the day was taken up with discussions on the Bible or working as a volunteer to keep Taizé functioning. This might involve anything from washing dishes to cleaning toilets.
Perhaps the attraction lay in the music, which was simple and beautiful, consisting of prayerful phrases repeated over and over in many different languages. Or perhaps it was Brother Roger's affection for young people.
He also had a deep rapport with children. He rarely went to prayer unaccompanied by children.
While I was there, we all knew that one of those children was very special. In the late 1970s, Brother Roger had spent some time working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. She had placed Marie, a dying four-month-old baby in his arms so that she could die surrounded by love. She did not die, and Mother Teresa told Brother Roger that this was a sign that the orphan should go with him to Taizé. Simpler and more innocent times!
No-one batted an eyelid at an Indian baby virtually being adopted by a celibate Lutheran pastor and taken to France.
Marie spent a lot of her first year in Brother Roger's arms as he worked, but was raised by Genevieve, his indefatigable sister who had been with him from the beginning. In the 1940s, together they had sheltered first refugees, many of them Jewish, and then after the war, with a great deal less social approval from locals, German prisoners of war.
Perhaps the attraction of Taizé lies in something very simple. Brother Roger was not a media hero, but a hero of a different kind.
Had Brother Roger survived the attack, I am certain he would have forgiven his assailant.
GK Chesterton said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting: it had been found difficult and left untried.
The attraction of Taizé for young people shows it is not so much that Christianity has been left untried, but it has not been tried often enough.