Church was traditionally a media leader — about time they caught up

THE cynicism with which the Pope’s venture onto YouTube was greeted is ill-informed.

Moving into new communications technology isn’t an innovation for Catholicism. It’s been a constant throughout Church history.

Communication is the Christian imperative. Christ’s apostles were instructed to go and teach all nations. When he spotted a man up a tree trying to hear him, he brought him down and talked to him. When his followers tried to stop him communicating with younger people, he told them to “suffer the little children to come unto me”. The parables he told used not just the language of the people to whom he spoke, but their references, the tools of their trades, the images of their daily experiences.

Joseph Goebbels, who regarded Christ as the ultimate salesman, copied many of his methods, not least his emphasis on semiotics — his use of symbols ranging from palm leaves to the overturning of the moneychangers’ tables at the temple, not forgetting the abiding symbols of his crucifixion.

The tiny band of Christians left after his death chalked symbols on walls to send messages to followers. They used liturgy and song to elevate and enlighten. St Paul corresponded across continents, sending letters meant to be read aloud at group meetings.

Each nation, as it became Christian, used its own skills and crafts to communicate the message. In Ireland, Christianity went to the heart of Celtic culture, finding expression though every craft and art available, whether in the ‘statements in stone’ of the ancient crosses, with their detailed storytelling, or the illuminated manuscripts.

The first sizeable book emerging from the printing press, when it was invented, was the Bible. It fitted the pattern: As every communications innovation arrived, Christianity pioneered its use. So the rose windows of the great cathedrals were used to educate the illiterate. Thomas Aquinas stressed the importance of public lectures and disputations. Church bells owned the day and warned of disaster. Saints and the Madonna owned the themes of life and were a comforting presence when individuals were under pressure, even if they had to create the images themselves, as happened during the siege of Stalingrad, when a medic found the time, just before Christmas, in the filth, starvation, disease and death, to paint, on the back of a big map of Moscow, what became known as the “Fortress Madonna”. The painting provided solace to men who died within hours of praying in front of it. It survived the siege and is on public display today.

Accompanying the emphasis on technology were the reminders that what was being communicated was more important than the technology used. The Council of Mayence, in 813, for example, urged priests to write their sermons in language ordinary people could understand.

The Church concentrated on the transmission of information — even rumour — in order to stay on top of the political developments throughout Europe. During the War of the Roses, for example, when James I of Scotland was murdered, a courier was sent the 440 miles from Perth to London, changing horses frequently so as to be able to cover roughly 40 miles a day, in order to bring the news to Cardinal Beaufort who could in turn, send the message by sea to the Pope.

The fact is that at all points in history up to the latter half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church was in the vanguard of communications.

Sometimes, the adoption of new communications technology by the Church came about because the Church perceived itself to be threatened or outflanked. For example, when Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius the 12th, was given his first major post within the Vatican, his appointment coincided with the banning of the Catholic Boy Scouts by Mussolini, who was, at the time, on a mission to wipe out any powerful Catholic organisations in Italy.

The Pope promptly attacked the Duce’s action in an encyclical entitled Non abbiamo bisogno. What Pope Pius the 10th didn’t realise was that, since the Fascists controlled all the telegraph lines and cables to the outside world, Mussolini was in total communications control. He would — and did — read the encyclical before anybody else did. He could — and did — reply to the encyclical before its key messages could be absorbed.

Cardinal Pacelli went into supercharged action. He stuffed copies of the encyclical into the suitcase of an American priest named Francis Spellman who had access to private planes, instructing him to get it to France and publish it from there. Spellman later became a Cardinal, but the more important outcome was Pacelli’s determination to get ahead of the posse in terms of communications technology.

Within a short space of time, according to the American polemicist Whittaker Chambers, Pacelli “had equipped the Vatican with a short-wave radio station (‘for research and propaganda’), a new electric powerhouse, a fleet of modern automobiles (gifts of the manufacturers) to replace the old carriages, electric elevators, 800 telephones, a telephoto apparatus and an electric device to replace the bell ringers at St Peters. The fabric of St Peter’s became as modern as the fabric of New York.”

That pattern held throughout the first half of the 20th century: When a new technology came on board, it was initially explored and then often adopted by the Church. The results were sometimes mixed. It was a racist fascist priest who made the most of radio in its early days in the US, becoming a nationally powerful thought-leader for a time. On the other hand, Bishop Fulton Sheen managed to be profound but not recondite in the early ’60s on TV. DVDs of his TV sermons still rack up substantial sales.

It could be argued that the Church’s communications leadership was grievously damaged — with the best of intentions — by some of the thinking which came out of the Second Vatican Council.

As quintessential Catholic William F Buckley put it: “The Church threw away fish-on-Friday, liturgical Latin, tough rules for the priests and nuns; and, for their pains, got emptier and emptier churches.”

The Church in Ireland, which — through men like Fr Peter Lemass and Fr Joe Dunn — had been a world leader in training religious for radio and TV, nonetheless failed to make the most of those media, ceding them, in the late ’70s and thereafter to populist priests like Fr Michael Cleary.

Against a background of two millennia of Catholic Church emphasis on communication and speedy adoption of communication innovations, the Pope’s arrival on the web is admirable, if somewhat overdue.

It is unfortunate that a communication from the Vatican which has gone worldwide in the last 24 hours, without the requirement to visit Pope Benedict’s site, is a message designed to placate traditionalists. The announcement that the Papacy has rescinded the excommunication of a bishop who denied that the Holocaust ever took place has drawn fury from Jews — in a year when the Pope was due to visit the Holy Land.

The Vatican can’t afford to forget that it is the message, rather than the medium, which truly matters.