A Church That Must Go Out -- Pope Paul's Final Exhortation

By Bishop David Ricken

Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken of the need for a Church that goes out from itself, bringing mercy to the margins of society. This call is evident in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel), in which he states, “An evangelizing community gets involved by word and deed in people’s daily lives; it bridges distances, it is willing to abase itself if necessary, and it embraces human life, touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others.”

These words, like much of Pope Francis’s thought, draw heavily from Pope Paul VI (1963-78), whom Pope Francis will beatify, or bring one step closer to being declared a saint, October 19.

On December 8, 1975, Pope Paul issued Evangelii Nuntiandi, “On Evangelization in the Modern World.” This apostolic exhortation was shared with the hope of fostering “a new period of evangelization.” Pope Francis has called Evangelii Nuntiandi “the greatest pastoral document that has ever been written to this day.”

Evangelii Nuntiandi advanced the call of the Second Vatican Council to become a Church that reaches outside of itself and transforms the world around us (see Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, 2). Through proclaiming Christ to the world, the Church and those who accept her message will experience a profound change of mind and heart.

Paul VI was keenly aware that evangelists had to first be evangelized. The self-righteous, the judgmental, those who feel they are better than others would not bear fruit. Repentant sinners, those who realize they can’t live life on their own and need Christ, those willing to listen to others and share their own stories of how Christ has touched their lives – those would be the needed witnesses who experience continual conversion.

Paul VI also challenges us to see evangelization as more than just a one-on-one encounter, but also the transformation of society and culture. Evangelization calls for a new way of living personally and as a people. The power of the Gospel affects, or as Paul VI states, upsets “mankind’s criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration and models of life which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.”

Yet Paul VI realized that even as the Gospel transforms peoples and societies, “the conditions of society in which we live oblige all of us therefore to revise methods, to seek by every means to study how we can bring the Christian message to modern man.” In other words, the way the Church spreads the Good News is always evolving. This has been evident recently in the calls for “new language” at the Synod of Bishops in Rome. It’s also the case with the many Catholics, bishops, clergy and lay people alike, who have generated a powerful witness through their use of social media, Pope Francis chief among them.

The vast and immediate reach of digital technology means today’s evangelizers have more tools than ever at their disposal. This is a gift, especially because proclaiming Christ to the world is not optional for the Church. All Christians are called to share the joy of Christ and his Gospel. Bishop Paul Bradley of Kalamazoo, Michigan, recently said on Twitter: “It’s not that the Church has a mission; rather the Mission, of spreading the Good News of Jesus, has a Church to carry out the mission.” Or as Paul VI said, “She exists in order to evangelize.”

Paul VI prayed that evangelization would become our “daily preoccupation” and “a way of life and action." With the Lord Jesus Christ as the center of our lives, may we go forth boldly, sharing the joy of the Gospel with all we meet.

Bishop Ricken is bishop of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis. He tweets @BpDavidRicken.

CNS photo/Michael Alexander, Georgia Bulletin

When Your Phone Becomes Your Prayer Book

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

Many media snickered when the Vatican announced that people who followed the World Youth Day pilgrimage via social media could derive the same spiritual benefits earned by those present in Rio de Janeiro for the international church event. Were they worried that it made a spiritual effort too easy?

Certainly tuning in on social media is a far stretch from the work of Chaucer’s pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales. But from the church’s standpoint, social media allows World Youth Day to include those who could not travel to walk alongside the youth on pilgrimage.

Going social media follows the church’s tradition of keeping up with the communications arts. No surprise here. In the mid-eighties, the Vatican announced people could receive the pope’s Urbi et Orbi (To the city and to the world) apostolic blessing on Christmas and Easter via TV without standing in St. Peter’s Square. Earlier in that century the church moved into the then new medium, radio. Guglielmo Marconi considered the inventor of the new medium, launched Vatican Radio in 1931. The worldwide service now airs in 47 languages. Voice of America went on the air in 1942.

To bring the Gospel into people’s lives, the Church has no choice but to engage with contemporary media. Given what some consider the usual glacial movement of the Holy See – when you’re 2,000 years old, why hurry? – the Church has entered social media with lightning speed. After all, the World Wide Web only took off in the mid-nineties. Facebook was born in 2004; Twitter in 2006.

The church searches for ways to use media for its mission. For those who want a few moments with Scripture, for example, the U.S. bishops accommodate them with daily readings and a meditation on them via www.usccb.org/bible. For those who want to spend more time with daily prayer the Irish Jesuits have Sacred Space at www.sacredspace.ie. Such media aids have replaced the prayer books of a generation or more ago. For many, iphones have become prayer books. One may not find the same religious sensory appeal in holding an iPad as in holding a Bible, but that downside may be offset by the accessibility to Scripture found on the Web.

Church entrepreneurs have developed apps for everything from the rosary to the Divine Office. (Caution: Don’t judge someone looking at his phone before Mass – he may be praying the Liturgy of the Hours, as the Office is called.)

Pope Francis tweets virtually every day with challenging and inspiring messages. USCCB shares them via USCCB Facebook and Twitter accounts. It’s a spiritual boost from the man who is charm the world with his down-to-earth spirituality. It’s also a connection with the Vicar of Christ.

Believers accept the fact that God is everywhere. It shouldn’t surprise us when God shows up in social media.

(CNS Photo/Gretchen Crowe)

Pope Francis: Rebuilding the Church Through Communication

Bishop of Rome, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Servant of the Servants of God and... Global Communications Focal Point?

It may already be happening.

Pope Francis appointed a working group of eight cardinals on April 13 to advise him on the governance of the Catholic Church and reform of the Roman curia. This move has many wondering what shape such reform might take. As a communications professional, my thoughts immediately go to something the Canadian communications genius and Catholic Marshall McLuhan once said about the papacy.

Several commentators have already invoked McLuhan's famous line, "the medium is the message," to describe the new pope's gestures of humility, such as refusing to live in the apostolic palace and washing the feet of young inmates. But three years before his death in 1980, McLuhan, who coined the term "surfing" and predicted the Internet as early as the 1960s, addressed how the papacy would be affected by a world of instant communication: "When things speed up, hierarchy disappears and global theatre sets in," he said.

This prophecy came true just a year later with the election of John Paul II, a rock star pope for modern media, if there ever was one. John Paul died in 2005, a year before the launch of Twitter and a year after the start of Facebook. Communications have only become more instantaneous, and the papacy has had to keep pace. The papal Twitter handle, @pontifex, launched in December 2012, is one reflection of this.

Additionally, Pope Francis has taken the interesting step of holding his daily Masses at the Vatican guest house. Earlier popes celebrated these Masses privately with their household staff and guests. Opting for a more open setting, Pope Francis has given himself a daily platform to address just about any topic he chooses in the context of the day's readings. The practical result has been that, by the time people in the United States are waking up, a story is waiting in our news feeds with the latest from the pope.

Vatican commentator John Thavis calls this development the pope's "mini-Magisterium." Another apt description might be that Pope Francis has decided to fill the media vacuum. This is profound not only in terms of exercising his ministry as a universal teacher and pastor, but also for his responsibility to promote unity in the Church and his choice to do so through mass communications. If every Catholic with access to modern media makes an effort to listen to Pope Francis on a daily basis, internalizes what he has to say and informs his or her actions with it, the pope becomes a pontifex maximus (chief bridge builder) like never before.

It also echoes McLuhan's prediction of bureaucracy giving way to communications.

We've seen other bishops follow versions of this model. For instance, to meet the challenges following his 2011 appointment to Philadeliphia, Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., has simultaneously stripped back archdiocesan infrastructure while embracing his bully pulpit through digital media. USCCB President Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has been tweeting and blogging for a while now, has a newly launched online presence. And one of the pope's eight new advisers, Boston's Cardinal Seán O'Malley, OFM Cap., was the first blogging cardinal in the United States.

But it isn't only about popes and bishops utilizing social media. For instance, the far-reaching quality of Pope Francis' message is tied directly to the men and women of the Catholic press who cover him. Special praise goes to Vatican Radio, which has been on hand to cover the Masses at the Vatican guest house, the administrators at News.va, who promote what the pope says via social media, and Catholic News Service, which has combined web video and a traditional forum -- the pope's Wednesday General Audience -- to generate truly creative and attractive content that any pope would be pleased to have at the service of his message.

And of course social media aren't only in the hands of a few professional gatekeepers. Everyone has access. As a result, these platforms have transformed the Church into a landscape of blogs, tweets and viral content where real conversations happen and the public at large gets a pulse and a picture of life in the Church. Pope Francis seems to recognize that his role is to embed himself at the heart of this universe, evangelize it and draw people closer to each other and to Christ.

For more on Pope Francis' approach to communications, here's a recent reflection by Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

(CNS Photo/Paul Haring)

The Council at 50: Vatican II on Communications: Speaking to the World

 

Welcome to one of the series of blogs on the Second Vatican Council. Each piece reviews one of the 16 documents produced by the Council Fathers during the extraordinary occasion in Church history. Vatican II, which drew together the world’s bishops, opened fifty years ago in St. Peter’s Basilica, October 11, 1962.

(Photo courtesy Catholic News Service)

 

A first decision the Fathers at the Second Vatican Council faced was whether to restrict themselves to internal church matters, such as liturgy, or to expand their mission to include what matters to the entire world. They chose the latter and opted to include within the Council’s scope the immense topic of social communications. The Fathers sought, they said, to speak on public communications in order to promote “not only the eternal welfare of Christians, but also the progress of all mankind.”

Inter Mirifica, the decree on social communications, takes its name from the first words of the document’s Latin (and official) version, which mean “among the wonderful.” It acknowledges the media’s awesome power for good or ill and heralds its potential for everything from uplifting people’s spirits through the arts to keeping them informed via news media to providing tools for religious education.

Given the explosion of media since the document was published in 1963, the message, though brief, was prescient. It spoke of “the press, movies, radio, television and the like” with “the like” having come to include the internet, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and whatever other media lie on the horizon or beyond.

Inter Mirifica  spoke of a sense of morality to guide media use. It said people have “a right” to information and said the news communicated “should always be true and complete, within the bounds of justice and charity” and that how news is communicated “should be proper and decent.” The Council explained that “both in the search for news and in reporting it, there must be full respect for the laws of morality and for the legitimate rights and dignity of the individual.” It called on public authorities to guarantee freedom of information, describing it as “a freedom that is totally necessary for the welfare of contemporary society, especially when it is a matter of freedom of the press.” The words hold meaning now as the news business grapples with everything from wiretapping to leaks to manipulation of images.

Inter Mirifica also highlighted the role of other communications arts such as film and drama to help people understand evil in order to “reveal and glorify the grand dimensions of truth and goodness.” It called for “moral restraint” in such presentations “lest they work to the harm rather than the benefit of souls.” It offers guidance to producers as they decide how much violence they need to illustrate conflict or how much sexual intimacy to reveal to emphasize relationships.

The Fathers called on church authorities to develop quality media within its own walls. It spoke of the news media, saying, “a good press should be fostered,” involving both church officials and laity. It urged the church to prepare “literary, film, radio, television and other critics” to “put moral issues in their proper light.”

Inter Mirifica called for two specific actions at the Vatican to enhance mass communications. The first was to establish the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, the Vatican office that subsequently developed key Pastoral instructions,  Communio et Progressio (Unity and Advancement),1971, that emphasizes relationships with public media, and Aetatis Novae (At the Dawn of a New Era), 1992,  that looks at the inherent challenges presented by modern developments in media.  Inter Mirifica also called for an annual World Communications Day, reminding churches to celebrate their media locally. The Vatican has since used this occasion to address such contemporary topics as ethics in advertising, pornography and the digital age.

Inter Mirifica  posed a challenge that still faces the church when it recognized the difficulty and costs of providing quality media, but said this work is imperative, a matter of the soul of humanity.

“It is quite unbecoming for the Church’s children idly to permit the message of salvation to be thwarted or impeded by the technical delays or expenses, however vast, which are encountered by the very nature of the media,” the Council Fathers said. The challenge still stands before us.

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Bishop John Wester of Salt Lake City chairs the Communications Committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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Catholics and Social Media

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh

            A recent sign of technology in church was a man watching the Olympics on his Smartphone. He may be among those very few Catholics who, the Public Religion Research Institute says, “incorporate technology into their practice of worship.”     

Public Religion’s July 2012 report finds that few Americans use social technology for religion and that Catholics especially lag in this area: while 19 percent of Evangelical Christians reported having posted something about being in church on Facebook, only six percent of mainline Protestants and two percent of Catholics have done so. It added that while a quarter of Evangelicals have downloaded or listened to a sermon on line, just six percent of mainline Protestants and Catholics have done so.

However, there is much proof that Catholics are present in the new media world via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, web pages and other forms of social media.

            The U.S. bishops’ website, www.usccb.org attracts almost 100,000 visitors each day to its site for liturgical readings of the day, www.usccb.org/bible/readings. These visitors see and hear a brief reflection on the readings at www.usccb.org/bible/reflections.

            The bishops’ Facebook page, www.facebook.com/usccb, boasts about 40,000 followers and is growing. Posts on USCCBlog, found at http://usccbmedia.blogspot.com find their way into other corners of the blogosphere, both through church blogs, such as America Magazine’s “In all things…” and blogs in the secular arena, including Huffington Post, Politico, Washington’s Post’s “On Faith” and USA Today’s “Faith & Reason.”

            A recent social media foray is the church’s religious liberty texting campaign. The bishops urge people to text “Freedom” or Libertad” to 377377. Texters can sign up for brief messages about religious freedom, a key issue now.

            Church blogs abound. Gossip blogs offer “inside” information, such as who might become a bishop next. Several blogs feed a liberal or conservative base, and, I fear, stoke church polarization in this election year.

            Some bishops blog. Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, files a “Monday Memo” at www.tucsondiocese.org. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York often makes news at http://blog.archny.org. Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston lets people know what he’s doing on his travels with www.cardinalseansblog.org. Others, such as Bishop Christopher Coyne, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, Arkansas, post homilies, or at least 140 characters from their homilies, on Facebook or Twitter.

            Catholics who use the Web for spiritual development can go to many sites, including not only the USCCB site but also sites geared to meditation, such as the Irish Jesuits’ http://www.sacred space.ie and Franciscan Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, www.cac.org.

            The church has a long history of wise use of media technology. Once Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-15th century, the first book off his printing press was the Bible. Radio became popular in the United States in the early 20^th century, and one of its first shows was “The Catholic Hour,” which ran from 1930-1950, and featured the priest/preacher Fulton Sheen. Television surged into popularity in the fifties and Sheen became an Emmy-Award-winning TV star for his program “Life Is Worth Living,” 1951-1957. The syndicated “Fulton Sheen Program” followed, 1961-1968. Given this history, despite the Public Religion Research Institute data, the Catholic Church won’t lag for long in use of the newest technological means of communication, social media.

The Gospel and Social Media

Two caveats for evangelizers, that is, those who spread the Gospel today: 1. Use social media and 2. Follow its rules. It’s a new day in church work: the computer has replaced the pen, 15 minutes seems like eternity, and if you don’t get your message out fast, the audience disappears.

Here are some rules for social media evangelization:

1.  Translate church teaching. If you pour out documents or list a series of them online, you’re not spreading the Gospel, you’re simply creating an electronic file box. A document drop might help someone with his dissertation but it won't help us follow the command to go forth and teach all nations. Teachers have to translate church teaching into popular speech. The evangelizer is a translator.

2.  Avoid church speak. Some phrases create barriers to communications. “Intrinsically evil,” for example, may earn an A on a theology paper but can merit an F in human discourse. Which drives home the message: “Abortion is wrong because it snuffs out innocent life” or “abortion is intrinsically evil”? One tells you what really happened. A second example of church speak is the word “presbyterate,” which emphasizes the distance between priests and people. There's more warmth in speaking about "our priests." “Presbyterate” sounds pejorative, as in “Listen, you presbyterate!"

3.  Use images, as Jesus did. God’s love is a freebie; you can’t earn it, you just have to accept it. Which sentence conveys that? “God’s love is infinite and you have inherent value” or “You're more important than the sparrows who only have to exist for God to feed them”? The image gives you something to hold on to, even if you don’t like worms.

4.  Understand that social media is social. It's like going to a party. You can’t sit in a corner and not converse. If you want to make a statement to which no one can reply, buy a billboard. Social media is electronic conversation. To engage in it you need to be willing to listen to others and converse with them.

5.  Social media sometimes calls for a suit of armor. Its anonymity lets incivility into the living room. Wearing emotional armor, you can handle disagreement, not take it personally, and learn from it. Social media is not for the thin-skinned.

6.  Use the delete button if comments cross the line of decency, but, hopefully, not often. Sometimes for your own sake you just have to say “So long.” You don’t need to be imprisoned on a social media site. But don’t walk away too quickly.

7.  Spread Catholicism’s fun parts. Talk about saints, like St. Nicholas, who came up with bags of gold for a woman's dowry, or St. Teresa of Avila who, when exasperated by life’s trials, advised God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!” Talk about good sermons you’ve heard, favorite hymns. Catholicism is warm, filled with stories, meaningful devotions, and other down-to-earth ways to convey the faith. It is not heady. Reaching into the heavens for language can make it hell for listeners.

8.  Remember rules are changing. I felt strange the first time I sent a condolence message via the Internet. Then I realized that my friend had announced her father’s death in an e-mail message. I could either wait until I had time to find the proper stationery and mail the note, or I could respond in her time of need. The Internet makes simple human gestures easier.

9.  Remember web messages live forever. The warning to not write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front of the newspaper is more pertinent now. A picture of you hoisting a beer seems like a good idea until you find someone’s researching you online for a responsible position.

10.  Keep it short. The days of the 75-word sentence ended with Cardinal Newman. Phrases such as “Jesus wept,” and “Mary was silent” speak volumes, and usually less is more.

Catholic communicators: more than a “looking glass”

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications brought together 204 delegates from 85 countries Oct. 4-7, 2010 to discuss Catholic print publications and the impact of the “new media” (the Internet and social networking sites) on their work.

While the Italians, French, Germans and Americans had some of the larger delegations, the diversity of the experiences of Catholic journalists in areas such as India, Africa and Latin America enriched the conversations. And, despite our diversity, several common themes emerged in the three and half days that we met. We were divided into small groups by languages and geographical regions for discussions following most plenary sessions. There were 11 small groups: four English, two each in Italian, Spanish and French, and one in German. It was obvious that English is becoming the global language, even in a Church that proclaims Latin as its preferred universal tongue. Interestingly, half the time the Germans reported out to the full assembly in English, since, as the reporter said, “it would be faster.”

The week began with a presentation by Amy Mitchell of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Mitchell explained what the Americans already knew: print publications are in serious trouble in the states, and, while the web and all its components didn’t begin the decline in readership for them, it seems to be accelerating it. Other presenters indicated that, while print publications may still be healthy in Europe and actually growing in developing nations, as literacy rises, the implications of an Internet-driven society is that it won’t last long.

Catholic journalists and communication professionals also noted, both in the formal presentations and in reports from the small group discussion, that they are fettered in their work by bosses who fail to understand the implications of not reporting both the good and the bad news. It was encouraging to hear the French Bishop Stanislas Lelanne tell us, while he expects us to deeply love our church, that does not mean that we become “the voice of our master.” He also said that he thought it was a good thing that readers don’t always agree with what they read in their Catholic publications. If there is no debate in a Christian community, it is not a true community, he said.

Other speakers repeated the need for the Church to use its media outlets as places for conversations and dialogue to occur, both among Catholics and with the larger community. We were reminded that in some parts of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, both the Church and the marginalized are still actively persecuted and oppressed. The Church has to serve as the voice for the voiceless, speakers said again and again. Sometimes this means giving voice to those who are oppressed by church leaders. One Polish editor explained that we have to help bishops understand that their Catholic publications are not to serve as “talking mirrors,” telling him that he is the fairest prince in all the land. (I am sure some of these quotes were better in their original language.) This concern, raised again and again, was even more remarkable, in my opinion, since all of the delegates were selected by their episcopal conference and therefore would be considered “loyal” church workers.

As Ludwig Ring Eifel, editor-in-chief of the German news agency Katholische Nachrichtenagentur Pressebild (counterpart to our own Catholic News Service) said, “Believing in the church does not mean that we do not report on conflicts within it. And writing about the tensions in the church does not mean that we abandon its Christian values.”

It seemed that a majority of the participants were also eager to use social media, such as interactive websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc., to engage their populations. Some noted that there, too, they experienced resistance from their bishop-publishers because of fear of criticism and dissent. But those who have been at work in the blogosphere and other social media networks see the potential good outweighing the risks. Across Europe, North America and Oceania readers of print publications are aging. Websites and social media, however, are attracting younger audiences. These younger Catholics are eager to explore their faith and embrace it, and the only way they know to do that is to discuss and challenge their own ideas and others’ opinions.

A presentation by a Dominican priest from Africa showed the rapid deployment of submarine fiber optic, which is giving the African continent as fast and reliable access to the Internet as the rest of the world. It highlighted the fact that the digital divide is rapidly turning into a digital bridge and that the Church in Africa needs to breach the gap and engage in social media as its younger members embrace it.

Finally, the third major theme I observed was a sense that Catholic media have a role that is unique among media. It might be best expressed by a quote from David Quinn, an Irish journalist: “We have to offer an ethic of self-sacrifice and commitment, as opposed to the ethic of individualism” that seems to permeate so many societies, including Western democracies.

This was expressed in several ways: calls for an emphasis on a message of Christian hope, challenging people to work for the common good, to give voice to the voiceless, to present the Gospel in a way that is accessible to today’s attention-deficit-ordered news consumers, to use the professional standards and ethics we learned in journalism school, to face off against the growing and cynical news-as-entertainment mindset, and to provide positive stories about people rising above great suffering and oppression, both in secular Western societies and in non-Christian developing nations.

Telling the Christian message of hope is challenging and necessary, Archbishop Claudio Celli said in his remarks that closed the formal session. But before we do that, he said, Catholic journalists need to challenge our personal vision of the Church. If the Church is going to serve humanity, he said, it must be a place for dialogue and respect, not an institution that attempts to dominate or to condemn. We have to be good listeners before we can be good communicators, he explained. Once we know what is in the heart of humanity, Catholic communicators can speak to that heart, allowing dreams and hopes to be realized. That, he said, is daring to be a prophetic voice for the world.

If you're interested in more information, Catholic News Service carried several stories on the Congress.

And Now Facebook

So it seems one of the projects that I could only hint at in the last blog post has come to fruition more quickly than expected. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops now has an official page on Facebook.

This page follows Twitter and this blog in terms of social media outreach by the Communications and Media Relations wing of the USCCB. Hopefully, the Facebook page will complete this picture, adding pictures, videos, forums for discussion, and links to USCCB and other content. This is all a work in progress, mind you, but these are our hopes.

So for any Facebook users who follow us on here or on Twitter, we happily suggest following the link in the first paragraph above and becoming a fan.

A side note -- our page should not to be mistaken with a pre-existing Facebook group that, despite its lack of affiliation, seems to suggest that it is part of our organization. This is not the case.