Fr Richard Leonard SJ is a visiting professor at the Gregorian University, Rome. He directs the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting and is the author of “The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema”, “Movies That Matter: Reading Film Through the Lens of Faith in the Light of Christian Faith” and “Preaching to the Converted”. Here he challenges Catholics to get out into the world of the communications media and to compete unashamedly with other groups for minds, hearts and values.
Let me commit a Jesuit heresy and say that of what we know about St Francis Xavier, he was, by today’s psychological standards, an obsessive-compulsive neurotic.
This is, of course, an unfair criticism. He was a man of his time, and few people have seized the imagination of their own and subsequent generations of Catholics in the same way he has. But it remains a fact that Xavier’s mission was to baptise everything that moved so that it might have a chance at salvation.
It is unknown how many people Xavier actually baptised. Some of his biographers guess that the figure is somewhere between 40,000 to 100,000 believers. From one of his letters we know that on one day in India he performed 4,000 baptisms (that’s 167 an hour). I am guessing the ceremonies weren’t all that personal.
And, of course, Xavier’s christening prowess was such that when Rome could not recover his whole body, Fr General Claudius Acquaviva ordered that Francis Xavier’s baptising right arm be severed at the elbow and conveyed to Rome. In 1617 it was enshrined in the church of the Gesù. This is now bejeweled, there in the Gesù for all to see.
So while Francis Xavier’s ideas about sacraments and salvation provided him with a burning ambition to go out to the world, we need to admit that his sense of mission is not one we readily endorse or emulate in the same way today.
But there remain two other facets to his missionary style that I think we could do well to recover in our personal and communal evangelisation. The first is that he physically went out to the world. The Church these days can act as though we have every right to sit at home and wait for the world to come to us – often expecting it to talk our talk and walk our walk. The problem here is that when we ponder the great commission of Mk 16:12 and its parallels, Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples to wait at home for the throng to come to them, but to do what Xavier did – go out and meet the world where they are, as they are.
The second facet to his missionary style we could adopt is to learn the language. When St Francis Xavier left Rome for Portugal and went on to India, we know that St Ignatius Loyola gave him one piece of advice: wherever you go, learn the language. It is hard work to learn a language, especially at an advanced age, but the new understanding and the ease it gives within a culture amply rewards the effort involved.
And whether we like it or not, the Church is now competing in the modern market place with the media, among other things, for the minds and hearts, souls and values of the very people to whom we’re sent.
There is a new cultural language spoken around here and if we want to influence this culture for good we have to learn its tongue. We have to face up to and use for good the media culture as it is, not as we would like it to be. For as Xavier and his Jesuit and lay missionary successors came to see, we cannot effectively evangelise a culture we don’t know, or worse still, one which we actually despise.
The problem is that some Catholics just want the media to be kind to the Church, report it well and take up its positive messages. Some of us rarely want to risk entering the media world, where we may not be in control, and we fear we will be tainted by the worst of its values. For more than thirty years now, the Church has said many laudable things about the relationship it wants to foster between the message of the Gospel, the media and our culture. In 2002, for example, John Paul
II wrote, ‘The impact of the media can hardly be exaggerated. For many the experience of living is to a great extent an experience of the media.’
Jesus understood the power of the media of his day – the parable. Likewise the Church has always understood that using words in stories and preaching is a most effective way to personal communication and witness.
Over the centuries the Church was most comfortable when communications meant the serious and time-consuming task of researching and reading. As last century drew on, however, communications became more democratic, the emphasis moved to entertainment, and the post-modern society challenged universal truth claims. In the last forty years, the Church was, in terms of the media, in retreat from the very culture it is sent to evangelise. More recent signs of hope are encouraging, but hardly the sort of robust interchange some of us might like to see.
Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of Catholics in the first world are comfortable in a media-saturated culture. They are increasingly lacking an interest in religious practise and they do not accord the Church any special status in public debate. Physical and sexual abuse scandals have seriously undermined the general affection and goodwill the Church once claimed. In this environment it can be hard for our message to be heard in the public forum and our quiet, continuing and sometimes heroic acts of service to be known.
And it can mean that even the good news we have to share is not proclaimed from the housetops. In an expression of false humility we don’t even tell our people that we are, outside Government, the biggest provider of education, healthcare and welfare in both Autralia and Ireland.
I don’t canonise our media culture, I just take it very seriously. Indeed from a Christian perspective there are very worrying signs in our society, manifestations of what recent Popes have called an “anti-culture”.
So what can we do about all of this?
To enter our media culture we need to let go of our long held suspicion of media that purely entertains; of the belief that we cannot use a popular forum to speak about the things of God because it requires too much seriousness, too much nuance. Jesus, in the way he used the media of his day, the parable, understood that the most important lessons could be learnt through stories – while people are laughing, crying, being confronted and consoled. He also knew the art of communicating his message simply. In some respects the Church has become too serious for its own good.
As passionate as the Church has been about various issues, it is creative and thoughtful filmmakers who are the marketplace preachers of our day. We need to rediscover the power of accessible stories to communicate our message and harness the necessary resources to tell them in the public domain.
One of the obstacles to this occurring is that the Church has been, understandably, seduced into seeing its relationship to the media in terms of public relations. We need to be very careful about how much money we invest in this necessary, but secondary, activity. We are not like other organisations where the promotion of our name, an individual or a product requires an expensive and systematic media campaign. We do have a responsibility to be accessible to the media, wise in using it, and constant in trying to be open with it where we can and by informing it about the daily good news stories with which we are involved. If we reduce our involvement with the media in this country to being a critic and concerned with public relations, the Church will lose out in the long run.
I think we need to leave behind the misapprehension that radio, television and film are good for direct evangelization. While the media can move the emotions and provide information that can be helpful to a person’s journey of faith, a person cannot have a relationship with his or her computer, radio or television. The gospel is essentially about relationships with Christ and the community that gathers in his name. To the degree the media can enable people to join this community it is helpful in the service of the Gospel. We should not take as our example television evangelists who often reduce Christianity to being anti-intellectual, morally black and white, wealth producing and miracle hunting. I am yet to be convinced that they keep their congregations past one generation.
The Church has commendably been a custodian of high artistic culture. We do not need to abandon that legacy from our past, but marry it with the popular culture which now forms the people with whom we want to speak and influence for good. This involves being conversant with the sporting and public entertainment events, music, television, Internet sites, video games, texting and films that appeal to a majority of our compatriots.
While we cannot recoil from our role in society as a constructive critic, we can be more supportive of the media in our culture which is often concerned with very similar issue. Many programmes look to show the cardinal virtues of justice, fidelity, self-care and prudence or the Christian values of mercy and hospitality. Some darker programmes even explore the consequences of the vices of malice, envy, greed, sloth, lust, pride and anger.
As recent Popes remind us, media that attends to these things can be implicit proclamations of the Lord. To this end, the Catholic Church could endow an award, like the Humanitas Award in the USA, where popular media is rewarded for its promotion of the best of human values. Rewarding it for implicit proclamation would be a constructive participation in the media industry.
This task could be understood as the commission to inculturate the gospel in a media culture. This is the stuff of sane missiology.
Our participation as a player in the media industry has not been found wanting. It has not been seriously tried. We are guilty of giving up too easily because media production can be expensive, because we may have to concede full control in ecumenical or secular alliances, the programmes were not explicitly Catholic and the results are not immediate or demonstrable. We want to influence the media culture for good, but we want to take few risks in our efforts and we want to participate on our terms. To be a player in our particular culture and to influence it for good, we need to be writing in secular journals, sponsoring programming on radio and television, making films or creating websites that tell the stories we think should be told and raise the issues that concern us. With courage, risk and creativity all this would be possible.
Conclusions
Armed with a spirituality like that of Xavier and those who followed him, we can go and learn the new language spoken in the modern market place where, these days, we have to unashamedly compete with other groups for minds, hearts and values.
If we continue to wait for the world to come to us, on our terms, then the media will assume even greater responsibility for shaping the values and the construction of meaning for our compatriots.
This can all seem a little overwhelming, so we need to ask the Lord to enable us to be shrewd and committed in the way we view media, careful about the way we speak about it, consume it, blame it and use it. We might also pray that we get committed and creative as we claim Xavier’s sort of Catholic spirituality – being impelled to bold action.
So, like St Francis Xavier let’s go out to our world with God.
Let’s go out with grace, courage and imagination.
But for Christ’s sake and in Christ’s name, let’s get going.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (May 2009), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
