The Trouble with Catholic Journalism
"Transparency" is the most important issue in the Catholic Church today. How do we know this? We know this because journalists tell us so. What is transparency? Transparency is when journalists tell us what the most important issues in the Catholic Church are.
A question for all my readers, Catholic and non-Catholic: how many times in the last month have you read or watched or listened to a Magisterial document of any kind in its totality? For Magisterial document, let's start with a maximally broad definition, including Papal speeches and homilies, documents produced by Episcopal conferences, documents put out by your local bishop, speeches and homilies by your local bishop, even homilies by your local pastor. Now let's narrow the field a little bit: how many times in the last month have you read a full document officially promulgated by a Pope, such as an encyclical, Apostolic Exhortation, Apostolic Letter, etc? Now let's narrow it even further: when is the last time you read a full document promulgated by the present Pope?
Now another question: how many times in the last month have you watched or listened to a journalistic report and/or analysis and/or editorial about a Papal document? Let's again start with a maximally broad definition, including not only Catholic journalists but mainstream media journalists, social media figures, heads of lay apostolates, lay pseudo-apostolates, celebrity priests, blogs, podcasts, random Twitter accounts, and so on, and focusing not just on Papal documents but on Papal or episcopal or presbyteral speeches, homilies, actions, activities, and/or sins. And, again, a narrower question: how many times in the last month have you read or watched or listened to a report of any kind of a document officially promulgated by a Pope? By the present Pope?
Now one more question: what is the crisis in the Catholic Church again? And is transparency the answer to that problem? Or is transparency in fact the problem itself?
Journalism and the Reign of Lies
Now, before anyone gets too mad at me, I fully acknowledge that when most decently well-informed people within the Church talk, somewhat imprecisely, about "transparency"--up to and including Pope Francis--they mean by it a certain, limited degree of official, public notification of acts and procedures and a certain access to information on the part of directly interested parties to said acts and procedures. In this sense, "transparency" is indeed very important to the functioning of the Church as of every comparable governmental or political or religious entity.
I even acknowledge that the lack of this sense of transparency caused by the crises of the 19th century led to very many large problems for the Church of the 20th century; and that, even now, the Church would benefit from an increase in "transparency" in this sense in regards to its internal economic and juridical procedures, especially those having to do with sexual abuse and other crimes (though here, as in every judicial system, notification of directly interested parties, especially victims, and public proclamations as to the outcome of cases must be balanced against the reputational and juridical rights of the accused and general rights to privacy on the part of all parties).
I also fully acknowledge that in a broader orbit of Catholic journalism and culture, "transparency" mostly just refers to the process by which Catholic journalists have on multiple occasions successfully ferreted out information about clerical corruption or abuse or financial crimes even when it was largely buried or ignored by or unknown to official Church networks. This adversarial "watchdog" role of modern journalism is an important (albeit insufficient) one given the highly conspiratorial, technical nature of modern institutional power, though it fundamentally has little to do with "transparency" in the above senses, since the entire point of this adversarial role is to operate outside of and hence to supplement official channels of information. Nonetheless, I do think such a role, carried out responsibly, is in fact important and beneficial to the Church.
Insomuch as I speak here somewhat dismissively about transparency, though, I do so to target a much broader and more diffuse set of viewpoints and pressures having to do with mass media and its access to and impact on and over the Church. In this sense, as it is used in a more diffuse sense especially by journalists, "transparency" refers to the degree of penetration and influence and even dominance over an institution exercised by mass media in general and journalistic media in particular. And it is in this limited sense that transparency is emphatically not the solution, but the problem.
As I recently discussed in this blog, fundamental to the modern state and modern power in general is the emergence of mass-media communication as a fundamental method of governance--one that is by its very nature productive of extreme secrecy and even conspiracy, since mass media in its characteristic modern forms thrives on simplicity and narrative and emotion and ideology, while government in its characteristic modern forms is complex and hierarchical and technical and hence incapable of being communicated even minimally in these forms.
As I tried to suggest as strongly as I could in that piece, it is emphatically not the case that the trend towards secrecy and the trend towards mass-media penetration are contrary trends: they are, in fact, rather one and the same trend considered under different aspects. Insofar as mass-media in its characteristic modern forms becomes the primary tool of communication between rulers and subjects, it is necessary and inevitable that most of what rulers do and say will not communicated honestly and truthfully, but will be to varying degrees distorted, lied about, and/or kept secret.
This is so for many reasons, but mostly because mass media in the contemporary sense is not primarily a form of communication aimed at conveying information accurately: it is rather a technique, a technology in the sense I have discussed, aimed fundamentally at producing a steady stream of "content" consumed in a few highly-constrained ways to amuse and/or entertain and/or relieve boredom and/or soothe stress and anger and/or generate attention and/or rouse desire and/or get people to buy products. Inasmuch as these, and not the communication of truth, is the end of mass-media technology, it is by its very nature largely indifferent to meaning or truth as such.
Even setting aside this fundamental question of what mass media is for, though, the simple reality is that the contemporary technologies of mass-media impose constant and enormous constraints on any communication of knowledge, such that the primary task of a journalist or other mass-media professional is precisely the elimination of the vast majority of meaning or content or information contained in a given event or speech-act, its radical shaping into a medium and method fit for "consumption," and the rapid superseding of this content by other such content-nodules.
Hence the strangeness of modern media-saturated life, where nothing really exists for people--even people who directly experience events--or has any impact on people's sense of the world unless and until it is communicated via mass-media: and even then, most things merely reported once or twice or a hundred times at intervals are entirely forgotten, such that really only things repeatedly and centrally reported and, more importantly, repeatedly fitted into prominent contemporary partisan media narratives in a central position are actually real for people.
Allow me to present a few examples of what I am talking about, one very public and impactful, and one more small-scale but still highly meaningful. In the first case, I happen to know beyond doubt that a certain prominent national-level politician has engaged over the course of decades in straightforward acts of sexual assault against women, including minors. I know this because I happen to know people who have witnessed these acts in person, as well as heard him speaking of them. These acts were not particularly secretive, and have been, I would reasonably infer, widely known and witnessed in various public and semi-public forums over the course of many decades.
This person is, as I have said, a very prominent national-level politician constantly in the public eye, with books written about him, innumerable profiles, news stories, etc: however, these acts remain almost totally unreported on, for reasons that are worth reflecting on in themselves. Namely, they are not reported on because the person in question is wealthy; because the person in question is well-connected in the worlds of journalism and politics, with many personal and institutional relationships with the supposed moral watchdogs of society; and most of all because the person in question has a central place to play in any number of media narratives of political and moral life in America, into none of which (even the hostile ones) these acts can easily be slotted.
There have been a few exceptions to this rule of silence over this politician's decades-long career, but even these have been treated as dubious exceptions and generally forgotten or disregarded shortly after their reporting. So far as I have seen, only a few partisan, not to say rabid, not to say obscure Internet sources tend to portray the politician in these terms, ever; and even here they stand in strong contrast to the more public and widely-accepted hostile partisan narratives, which of course portray this person negatively, but do so in ways that fit more easily into the general partisan media narratives.
Hence, in the public, mass-media narrative of the world, this politician's criminal acts and actual moral character, put simply, do not exist. Indeed, they do not exist in a much stronger and more extreme sense than would be possible without mass-media reporting. Without mass-media, there would, one presumes, be rumors passed from mouth to mouth about this person, possibly suppressed, possibly frequently disbelieved, but still impactful on his public standing and access to office and especially personal relationships: with mass-media, however, there is merely one, overriding narrative, reinforced in a thousand ways by a thousand reports, and it is this one narrative that determines and dictates how everyone, including people who know him personally, including even people who witness or suffer from his crimes, relate to and think about him. And this blockade of information will no doubt continue until his death, and will be inscribed into history.
Here is a second illustrative case. A number of years ago, a person I know encountered a case of sexual abuse in a (non-Catholic) ecclesial institution. When he began asking people about this, he was told by many people that this information was widely known, that it was obscure, that it was not worth pursuing. However, in the end, he pursued his researches to the point where he became aware, through speaking to people directly involved in events, of a past period of extremely widespread sexual abuse in the institution, one which had been extensively covered up ever since, for decades. Hence, he naturally went to journalists to make this information public, so far as it was possible.
One prominent investigative journalist agreed to do an extensive and fairly balanced report on the matter--upon which the ecclesial institution in question (one that was in a sense obscure and mostly out of the mass-media eye, but also had famously deep pockets) proceeded to threaten the newspaper(s) involved with lawsuits and other and sundry legal pressure if the report were published. In the end, a report was published--suitably edited by the institution's lawyers. This report quite effectively made precisely the opposite case initially intended, portraying the allegations of abuse as dubious and likely false, limiting the reporting to a single case, and in fact turning the report largely into a puff piece about the positive efforts of the institution and those associated with it to help those in need, one of whom happened to have made some dubious and likely false allegations.
In the end, what was published was a narrative that conveyed, in broad strokes, the exact opposite of the truth. Yet it is the first narrative that, for practically every relevant purpose, is the one that "exists" and has impacts on reality--including for those directly affected by the case, as most people quickly and passively accepted the media narrative and even the person who had made the initial allegations attempted to withdraw them in fear and was consequently fired. It is the latter narrative that will go down in history.
To summarize, The fundamental problem of modern governance and corporate and political and even (alas) religious power, is precisely that only what is presented in media is treated as real: and that what is not presented in media is treated not only as unreal, but as actively contradicted, impossible, buried, unhearable, unknowable, forgotten before it is even stated, with no conceivable impacts on anyone or anything.
Of course, what is real in this sense is not necessarily--indeed, is not intended to be--what is true in a philosophical sense. What is real in mass-media terms is what is symbolically conveyed, what is consumed, and hence what matters for the symbolic media pseudo-worlds of politics and economics and the Internet. Yet the bitter reality, as Baudrillard knew well, is that what matters most for contemporary life, for politics, narrative, the economy, the Internet, is increasingly and characteristically what is false--indeed, what is false because it is false, since what is false is manipulable and symbolically conveyable and infinitely exchangeable in a way that what is true never can be.
In this sense, the reign of mass media is precisely the reign of lies.
The Communication Theory of Church Authority
The concept of ecclesial authority is widely misunderstood in modern Catholic life--even where it is in fact accepted. That Christianity or Catholicism happens to possess a hierarchy of leadership, even a very explicit and fixed hierarchy, even a very widespread hierarchy, in no way distinguishes it from any other Christian or religious body--even Congregationalists or Southern Baptists or Christian Scientists. All institutions possess hierarchies of leadership: and the ones that most deny or suppress this reality typically have the harshest and least accountable hierarchies.
The concept of religious authority distinctive to Catholicism, however, especially that concept of religious authority to be found in early Christian and Late Antique contexts, is in fact highly distinct, and quite novel in its initial environment. It is distinguished primarily by the distinguishing features of Christianity itself: namely, it's highly rationalist focus, its metaphysics of transcendence, its ideology of universality, and its fundamental nature as a religion of revelation and indeed incarnation.
Put simply, the basic concept of Christianity from its origin focused on the idea that God had revealed something, and hence communicated something, to human beings--but that what he had revealed was rational and hence a form of knowledge, was universal in its scope and application and communicability, but was also transcendent and hence not capable of being communicated abstractly through words or writing or indeed any fixed medium or media.
While this may appear complex, it is easily summed up in the figure of Christ contained in the Gospels and especially the Gospel of John, where the human person of Jesus is treated precisely as a personal, tangible revelation or communication of a universal, transcendent divine Logos or rationality. Christ speaks any number of words and conveys any number of ideas, but these words and ideas are straightforwardly treated not as fixed, abstract communications of straightforward knowledge, but as an indefinite variety of means to communicate the transcendent Logos to human beings.
A large proportion of the Gospel of John is hence logically taken up with debates between Jesus and Jewish religious leaders over authority--debates that are emphatically not over the abstract logical or empirical correctness of Jesus' words or commands or teachings. Indeed, as many have pointed out, in John's Gospel the distinctive teachings of Christ of general effect for morality, theology, etc, found in the other Gospels or generally either ignored or simply assumed. The question is not whether one should or should not heal on the Sabbath for Scriptural or ethical reasons: the debate, rather, is whether Jesus, as an individual, physical human person, can in some way communicate transcendent reality through his words, acts, and even physical presence. The question, in other words, is not whether Jesus' teachings can be abstractly verified or not verified: they are over whether the acts, words, deeds, and presence of Jesus, which he claims communicate transcendent reality, in fact do so, or not.
Conceived in these terms, this debate is necessarily one over identity or origination, mission, and hence authority in the proper sense. Jesus can only communicate transcendent reality through his acts, words, and presence if he originates from this transcendent reality, not just in terms of his abstract ideas, but in terms of his actual, personal identity as a whole. If this is true, then all his specific acts of communication, including not merely teachings but also miracles and "sacramental acts," originate from this transcendent reality: and hence he has the authority to teach, preach, command, legislate, heal, or perform any other action necessary to convey this reality.
"Auctoritas" in its original Latinate sense is derived from auctor, the "originator" either in a physical or mental sense, the "author" of a work or the "father" of a person. For Christ in the Gospels, the ultimate proof of his "authority" comes in the assertion that God is, in some more meaningful and transcendent sense, in fact his Father. Christ is the auctor for his acts and words, and God is in turn his auctor: hence, to accept Christ is not just to receive his abstract teachings as abstractly true, or even abstractly regard him as the Messiah or a Rabbi or God, but precisely to receive him as a divine authority, a person who originates from and therefore communicates God.
Practically all discussions of ecclesial authority over the following centuries can be understood in terms of this basic nexus of concepts. The Apostle Paul spends a great deal of time and energy in his letters asserting his "authority" not in abstract terms, but in terms of the direct, personal origination of his Gospel and office and mission from Christ himself: "Paul, an Apostle not from human beings nor through human beings, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father." Even the term "Apostle" itself does not mean "teacher" or anything similar--it means, rather, "delegate," precisely in the sense of someone directly authorized to speak and act on behalf of another person.
Hence, discussions of episcopal authority in the first centuries of the Church consist to a very large extent in discussions of lineage--the direct communication or transmission of authority and doctrine from person to person. As Ignatius of Antioch teaches, the bishop is precisely the one who is delegated to teach and act in the place of Christ; and the priest or presbyter is precisely the one who is delegated to teach and act in the place of the bishop. The sin of schism or heresy, for Ignatius, is to receive "unauthorized" teaching and to participate in "unauthorized" assemblies of the faithful--not out of an excessive concern for canonical order, but because such teaching and such assemblies do not originate from God, and so cannot communicate the divine life. Irenaeus, similarly, spends many pages refuting Gnostic teaching on abstract rational grounds--but he also reminds his readers that his teachings are the teachings of the Church, and the teachings of the Church are precisely what has been communicated through authorized channels, received from Christ through the Apostles through the succession of bishops.
When here and elsewhere, the authority of the great Sees of the Church such as Rome was formulated, it is precisely in terms of this "communicative" or "source" theory of authority. As Irenaeus points out, the Church of Rome can trace its succession of bishops by name through hundreds of years to the Apostle Peter; and not only this, but all the other Churches all over the world consult with the Church of Rome and hence draw their own doctrine from it, such that to receive teaching from the Church of Rome is to at the same time receive the universal teaching of all Churches communicated by Christ to the Apostles. Tertullian expresses the authority of Rome and other chief sees in similar, if somewhat more abstract terms--they are, as it were, central hubs in the network of communication from Christ to the ends of the earth, from which all other Churches have drawn their doctrine and continue draw their doctrine. When a little later Cyprian of Carthage repeatedly and characteristically refers to the Church of Rome as the "principal Church" or as possessing "principality," he means principium in the more or less literal sense of "beginning," "origination," or "source." The Church of Rome is the most important Church, the teaching of the Church of Rome may be trusted when consulted, precisely because it is the "source-Church" from whence other Churches draw their teaching, and which has drawn its teaching in turn from Christ through the Apostle Peter.
Conceived in this sense, the Church is precisely and solely a network of communication extended throughout space and time. Indeed, when 4th century Trinitarian theology is added to the picture, in which Christ is seen as not just temporally but eternally the Logos or communicative act of God, all of Christianity can be seen as a network of communication of transcendent reality extending from the heights to the lowest parts of creation. God the Father communicates to the Son, who in turn communicates to the Apostles, who communicate in turn to their successors the bishops by means of the chief Sees such as Rome, who communicate in turn to their priests, who communicate to the people individually and collectively.
Again, though, it is important to realize that this obsession with origination is not merely, as it is often treated, a kind of primitive forensicism, a "source-criticism" before German source-criticism. It is certainly true that "Catholic" writers asserted and believed that their theological and moral teaching had come from Christ through the Apostles and bishops unchanged in its content--but they were, of course, perfectly aware that taken merely in abstract informational terms, the same formulations or words or concepts could just as easily be received through an indefinite plurality of other channels. As modern Protestants have shown, one hardly needs a bishop to be told, or even to come to believe in some sense, that Christ is God or that God is a Trinity or any other dogmatic formulation of Christian or even distinctively Catholic belief.
As in the debate between Christ and the Jewish religious leaders in John, though, the debates between "Catholics" and "heretics" hinged on the concept of authority in a much more far-reaching sense, a sense based precisely on the transcendent nature of what is communicated. The question between Christ and the Jewish leaders in John was not whether or not Christ's information about the Godhead had in fact been told to him by God: they were, rather, whether, as he claimed, all his discrete words, teachings, miracles, acts, and in short his entire person originated from and communicated the transcendent reality of God. This sense of communication certainly includes words or ideas, but also goes fundamentally beyond it. If Christ had convinced the Sadducees of every abstract claim he made about God or divorce or the Sabbath, he would still not have convinced them of his most fundamental claim that he was from God and that to stand in his presence, to relate to him, to hear teaching from his lips, to obey his laws and commandments, was to receive God himself, and have eternal life.
Similarly, the idea and doctrine of Church authority intrinsic to Catholicism, either in the early centuries or since, is not merely that the abstract claims made by the Catholic hierarchy or the Pope are in fact the same as those made by the Church of the 4th century, or the Apostles, or Christ--it is not even merely that the laws or moral teachings promulgated by the Pope are binding on those subject to them. The claim made by the Church, rather, is that the network of authorized teaching and enactment of Sacraments possessed today by the Church in fact originate directly from God, and therefore have the continual and intrinsic and public and verifiable power, just like Christ teaching and preaching in person, to communicate his transcendent life.
The Contradiction of Catholic Media
We can now return to the questions with which I began this essay. The question of Catholic belief is never merely what is communicated in the surface sense of words or ideas or abstractions; it is always and at the same time who is communicating it, and whether they have the authority to do so. It is on this question that the content of what is communicated, in a deeper, transcendent sense, in fact depends.
It is obvious, but nonetheless important to reiterate, that the crises of Catholicism in the West over the past centuries have all arisen because even Catholics have for the most part not received their ideas, their beliefs, their actions, their relationships with Christ and God, from the authorized channels of the Church, but from other sources. In the present day, in America, this is evident even in the most immediate and practical informational terms--as well as in much deeper senses. Put crudely, Catholics do not get their ideas about politics, religion, morality, God and man, from the Church: they get them from television. As De Tocqueville long ago pointed out, the fundamental distinctive thing about America is not a belief or set of beliefs: it is, rather, a "way of life," a joined economic and social and political and mass-media and interpersonal way of being that defines what it is to be American, and which has since to a large extent come to define simply what it means to be modern, or even what it means to be human, throughout the whole world touched by American media. And as pollsters have pointed out for many many years, by virtually all such measures, Americans of any religion or none are more or less exactly the same.
That American Catholics get their ways of life and beliefs not from the Church, but from the broader society in general and mass media in particular, should not, I think, be a very controversial claim, regardless of what one makes of it. While it is certainly troubling from the standpoint of the view of salvation and communication and Church authority sketched above, it is also by no means unprecedented. The Church exists always in "the world"--and Catholics always exist in both realms. For many generations of Catholics in many societies, they have lived in the world and drunk from its sources, but nonetheless returned to the Church, periodically or at least at the end of their lives, to receive from her also.
More troubling, though, in many ways, is the fact that Catholics increasingly get their Catholicism from mass-media, too.
With the rise of the Internet, this is increasingly true not merely for the unwashed masses of "unfaithful" Catholics, but for the "faithful" Catholics as well--not merely for the "uninformed" Catholics, but often to a much greater degree for supposedly "informed" or "intellectual" Catholics. And this is only getting worse as our society becomes more media-ized, more informationalized, via the Internet and other means.
With the rise of informational technology, mass-media technology, modern human beings began living more of their lives than ever before in the act of receiving abstract information from perfect strangers. Information, as I have suggested above, is always communicated from some person to another person--but we have privatized and anonymized this act as it has never been before in any society in the history of the human race. As Baudrillard said, Americans believe as no one else in "facts," in the "facticity" of facts, their total objectivity, which is precisely their total indifference to relation in any sense. For us, information is characteristically discretized and absolute: it has nothing to do with anything "subjective," including persons, societies, ethical systems, intentions, understandings, explanations, or acts of communication--or indeed to its object(s) in the real world. Facts don't care about your feelings.
The issue with this perspective is, of course, that truth is intrinsically and essentially a relation--a correspondence, as Aquinas put it, between mens, the mind, and res, the thing existing in the world. To assert the total facticity of facts, their total lack of relation to any mind or any thing, is thus, as Baudrillard has again pointed out, as much to say that truth does not exist, that there is no difference between a representation and the thing represented, or even that the representation is more real than the reality that it represents. After all, a thing is not a fact--but a simulation is a fact. A simulation is fully abstracted, fully exchangeable and quantifiable, fully representizeable and containable in discrete bits and bytes of information. It requires no relation to reality to sustain it.
Hence, to be Catholic, especially to be a "faithful" or "informed" or "intellectual" Catholic, means increasingly being someone for whom Catholicism is not a relation, but rather a "fact" in this sense. This person does not receive Catholicism from any person or network or hierarchy or institution, is in no sense a link in a chain of communication of transcendent reality from God to man. This person, rather, consumes Catholicism as information. For him Catholicism is a set of abstract ideas and "facts" existing on their own, in the mind or in texts or on the screen, and bearing no necessary relationship with anything outside of itself, including the Catholic Church. The facticity of his Catholicism is absolute: it requires no explanation, and is not subject either to verification or challenge by any institution or person--up to and including the Pope.
We have all likely encountered, on the Internet and in real life, Catholic experts with an indefinite multitude of opinions and judgments about every aspect of Catholic life and doctrine, who nonetheless do not attend Mass or receive the Sacraments. Almost more troublingly, we have all encountered and been impacted by an indefinite multitude of Catholic experts and apologists and journals and podcasts and apostalates and newspapers, who have in varying forms and to varying degrees told us what Catholicism is, what Catholic teaching is, without any authorization at all, or indeed any sense that such authorization might be important.
It is, of course, not a problem in itself that people get ideas and truths about Catholicism from sources other than the direct, authorized teaching of clerics. It is, rather a concomittant of the basic prudentialist, communicative structure of Catholicism.
After all, if Catholicism is a network of communication, this communication must inevitably work through more than the clearly and publicly "authorized" channels. What is contained in these authorized channels by its very nature must be applied at lower and more discrete levels, in families, in personal relationships, in speculative theology and philosophy, and ultimately in the heart of each individual person. It is not merely a failing that most Catholic schoolchildren have not read all of Fratelli tutti for themselves: and even if they had, they would still have to integrate this teaching into their hearts and apply it to their actual lives and in so doing communicate it to others.
Much of Catholic intellectual life and journalism in fact consists precisely of the very commendable attempts to put teaching into effect, to apply it to the indefinite plurality of human life and conduct, and to communicate its content and meaning of authorized teaching and acts to those who otherwise would have no capacity or ability to receive them.
Similarly, it is in fact possible for authorized channels to fail--for priests and authorized persons, too, to claim the authority of the Church for what rests on their own authority, to fail to faithfully communicate what has been communicated to them. And here, as the Ultramontane movement in the Church demonstrates very well historically, even those without authority must cleave to the authority of the sources even to the point of rejecting the channels.
Most fundamentally of all, perhaps, it remains true that the channels of communication between God and man can never be totally confined to the authorized, to the clerical, to the outwardly Catholic, or indeed even to the outwardly Christian. God can communicate himself in any way he chooses; and often does.
Still, if the fundamental claim of Christianity is correct, then the revelation of God in Christ--which is to say, the revelation of God in the Sacraments and teachings and other authorized communicative acts of the living Catholic Church on earth--is in fact the central, irreplaceable channel of God's revelation to man, to which everything else points, and from which everything else, Catholic or non-Catholic, draws its truth. It cannot be either ignored or replaced.
Here, though, is the great danger of Catholic journalism and Catholic media activity, especially in the present day. To act as a channel of authorized teaching is necessarily to wield authority--and hence to be tempted to wield authority falsely or to a greater extent than is actually true. My extensive experience with Catholic journalists and journals and intellectuals and Internet apostolates is that very few of them have been content merely to communicate the content of authorized teaching and actions. Virtually all of them have to varying degrees wielded the authority of the Church to in effect teach theses and instigate actions derived in reality from their own thinking, their own experience, their own political or social or intellectual partisanships and affiliations--and hence resting properly not on the Church's authority (since they do not originate from the Church, even if they are impacted by its thought), but on their own authority as intellectual or moral or political actors.
Again, that people wish to apply Catholic teaching to their own lives and those of others, that they wish to engage in political or social or moral thought along Catholic principles, that they wish to instigate moral action on Catholic principles, even that they wish to engage in speculative theologizing--none of these things are in themselves a problem.
The confusion of these efforts with what is actually publicly and manifestly authorized and comes through authorized channels, however, is an enormous problem--especially where this confusion is the result of deliberate efforts to claim public, manifest Catholic authority for what does not in fact possess it.
What is an even worse problem is when such persons and institutions not only claim the authority that belongs only to authorized Catholic channels, but begin to act against these authorized channels, denigrating them, challenging them, and working insistently to take their place. In this latter category, alas, fall the overwhelming majority of persons and outlets belonging to the purported "Traditionalist" movement in the Church. The repeated abuses and apostasies of Catholic media figures from Michael Voris to Steve Skojec to Audrey Assad and back again should surprise no one in this regard.
Against all the above, against even myself, a random Catholic layperson on the Internet, it must be repeatedly and insistently asserted that the average homily by the average parish priest in fact possesses more Magisterial authority, has more intrinsic and secure and manifest and public and reliable ability to communicate the transcendent reality of God, than the most brilliant masterpiece of the most brilliant Catholic to have ever lived. The only value of the efforts of individual Catholics, including Catholic journalists, up to and including the most brilliant intellectual to have ever lived, is to in fact succeed in communicating some small part of what has been communicated to him from Christ through the Church. Everything else is ultimately meaningless. Hence, if anything I have said or say is contradicted by any living ecclesial authority, I implore my readers to ignore what I have said, and submit to what is authorized. If American lay Catholics would spend their time reading only Papal homilies and speeches and encyclicals, to the exclusion of everything I have ever written, I would be well content.
At stake in this is, again, the fundamental question posed by both Christianity and Catholicism as a religious system--which is not whether I or any other writer or speaker is right or wrong in the abstract, but whether any particular person, through any particular act, is in fact in some way, large or small, succeeding in communicating the transcendent life of God. And here, by definition, only Christ suffices--and Christ is found in the Sacraments and teaching of the Catholic Church, as enacted continuously at the pulpits and altar of the humblest parish by the most ill-informed parish priest, as he is emphatically not found in the most brilliant texts of philosophy. And it is on that that our salvation depends.
Whither Catholic Journalism?
Given all of the above, the perils arising intrinsically from the existence of Catholic journalism should be obvious.
The principal danger to Catholicism, I believe, in the present era in the West is the attempted conversion of Catholicism into a form commensurable with contemporary mass-media culture. Yet Catholic journalism is necessarily and intrinsically engaged precisely into converting Catholicism into the terms and concepts of contemporary mass-media culture. Another principal danger to Catholicism is that Catholics receive their ideas and practice of Catholicism not from the authorized channels of the Church's hierarchy and Sacraments and teachings, but through those who use the present power of abstract, anonymous mass-media "information" to claim its authority and supplant its networks for their own purposes. Yet even at its best, Catholic journalism and media is precisely engaged in acting as a middle-man between authorized channels and individual media-ized Catholics, and in actual practice can be clearly seen on every side to be continually engaged in building its own alternative networks and insinuating them into the Church and replacing and supplanting the authorized networks of the Church's hierarchy and teaching at every level.
Of course, these problems go well beyond most of what is seen as official Catholic journalism--and in fact are most extensive in the wild wild West of the Internet beyond the bounds of any kind of organized, institutional media.
Yet the point I wish to emphasize, and which applies to all who engage in these efforts, whether by means of a blog or a Twitter account or an academic volume or a newspaper, is that the dangers contained in these efforts are not accidental, but intrinsic--and that in the present state of American society and the Church alike, these dangers are by no means small or easy to avoid. The practical reality is that most Western Catholics receive very little from the authorized channels of the Church, and very much from journalists and the Internet.
Catholics who engage with mass-media in any sense can act to make this situation better, by subjecting themselves strictly in word and thought to the Church's teachings, which means first and foremost not merely automatically and unthinkingly converting every aspect of Catholicism into content, into forms easily receivable in contemporary mass-media terms and narratives, but constantly and repeatedly and regularly listening to the Church's authorized channels according to their authorized forms, homilies and sermons and encyclicals alike. Once one has succeeded in receiving from the Church, one will be able to communicate what one has received, in different terms: but even here, each person must be extremely careful not to allow the forms to occlude or even become the content, an not to allow one's own communications to supplant the Church's authorized forms and channels. Ultimately, the purpose of any Catholic media regime is to apply and communicate what is received in the Church's authorized channels prudentially to life and thought--and, more to the point, helping to facilitate and promote and encourage other people's reception of the truth, not via one's own channels, but via the Church's.
In short, in the words of Leonard Cohen, to be a Catholic engaged in any form of media must mean to strive with all one's might to be nothing more than a "brief elaboration of a tube."
This is not easy. Given the present state of American society viz a vis mass media, apart from grace, it is much more likely, and, at least in public and on the Internet, much more common that those who engage in Catholic media and teaching will do nothing of the sort. They will, rather, in large and small ways, convert Catholicism as a transcendent communication of God into the communication of exchangeable quantifiable discrete mass-media information according to contemporary channels and forms and narratives, and in so doing supplant the Church's actual authorized channels, and in some small or large way make the situation worse.
And this, in short, is the trouble with Catholic journalism.
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