Evangelising the world...

In his weekly column last Friday, NCR reporter at large, John Allen, had a few words to say about Catholic communications. I liked this paragraph in particular. It was his summation of an address he'd given at a "ministerium" he participated in at the Diocese of Fort Worth on media...

	John L Allen Jr

My basic pitch in both instances was the following: Given the enormous potential for misunderstanding when the media covers the church, along with the all-too-frequent incapacity of the institution to tell its own story effectively, the church will never communicate well as long as we think of this as the exclusive responsibility of a small professional class of official spokespersons. Only when all Catholics come to think of themselves as "spokespersons" in their own arenas — among their friends and neighbors, around water coolers at work, and with respect to their local media — will the church stand a chance.

For all the common sense of Allen's comment though, I don't think that comment, or the other remarks he made in his column really addresses the heart of the present communication crisis the Church faces.

The harsh reality is that for centuries up until the early twentieth century, institutionally the Church had been almost without peer as a communicator in the world. To understand why today only 15% of the faithful in the Western world bother to listen anymore is a question that is not going to be answered by navel gazing and playing around in the shallows of analysis. Something major has gone wrong here. If the Church had been any type of commercial entity, or even a secular government, long before now it would have had to declare bankruptcy or it would have been driven out of power by the people. It survives though largely, I suggest, because of the extraordinary level of moral and financial capital it has built up literally over millennia.

What has gone wrong?

Taking this big picture view I submit there are basically three major failings in contemporary Catholic Church communications. These are the things that need to be addressed if the decline in participation is to be addressed and if the Church is to again return to being a major agency for spreading "the Good News" in the more educated, affluent and socially sophisticated regions of the world.

1. Confusion over the core message

The greatest single challenge the Church faces today I submit, is a fundamental confusion over what the "Good News" actually is. The institution proclaims that its core objective is the pursuit of truth. I honestly do not think the vast majority of the baptised see it that way any longer. The perception is that the major objective of the institution is protecting its own interests and particularly certain beliefs about itself including a notion that it never makes mistakes, never reverses its teachings and that virtually all Catholic theological thought is incapable of being challenged by new information that comes to us through the other domains of scholarship and enquiry. This self-understanding of itself I submit is now held by a certain sector of its membership as a higher credal value than the values we enunciate in the Creed.

The institutional leadership would seem to believe that why most people have left the Church is because they have been sucked out of the Church by attractions in secular culture, or they have become lazy and not interested in making the sacrifices necessary to maintain their faith. I honestly do not get that feeling in my conversations over many decades with peers who no longer practice. Sure some seem to have left through various forms of laziness or sloth. Many though have genuinely come to believe that the Church's understandings on certain issues are simply wrong. I would also submit the number of issues is actually not great compared to the millions of individual or particular issues that Church might have opinions about. However, these issues are what I would define as "critical issues" that do impinge on lived life. Many have left because of them but even within the still practising population it seems up to half, and possibly more, today simply ignore these aspects of Catholic belief and simply get on with their lives.

No organisation can grow when, at its heart, there is fundamental confusion over what its core message, mission statement and beliefs are. The reality today, I submit, is that even many of her priests and bishops have significant differences of theological opinion and belief with the small elite which, for so long, has effectively hijacked the communications' agenda of the entire institution.

Even in this morning's news we see yet another example of the flawed communication strategies of the last few hundred years being dragged out of the closet for the umpteenth time and dusted off again. The conservative sectors within the US Catholic Bishops are again mounting yet another endeavour trying to convince the world that the Church never makes mistakes and her thinking on this small number of controversial issues is correct and the rest of the world are dunderheads.

What has caused this ludicrous situation? I suspect it is partly clericalism — an institution's managers simply putting their own interests, security and need for respect and power before all else. The start of the problem I also suspect rests back in that enormous debate that went on in the Church over the issue of Papal Infallibility leading up to the First Vatican Council in 1870 and which was not actually resolved in an "infallible" (LOL) way by that Council. A small sector of society today have never accepted the compromise resolution that was adopted at Vatican I and they carry on today as though the Pope, and the Church, are actually and literally infallible in all things. There is nothing which can convince these people to any other point of view. They will literally take the Church down to remnant status by driving everybody else out rather than give up their point of view. I think the power of this group is acknowledged on all sides and within a slightly larger cohort of the leadership of the institution there has been this deep and persistent fear that to challenge that small sector would lead to schism. Unfortunately it has led to a schism — although not the one they feared. It has led to the "schism" where the great majority of the baptised in the Western world have simply walked out the door without protest.

I honestly do not know how this problem is going to be surmounted other than by intervention of the Holy Spirit at some time to send a leader who can lead the institution out of the mire. I do not believe the change will emerge from bottom-up agitation for change. The history of the last 150+ years ought demonstrate, if nothing else does, that no matter how much "bottom-up" agitation for change one has in this particular style of institution nothing works except clear direction from the top. The problem is we have not had "clear direction" from the top for an awfully long time. Or perhaps that should read, we have had plenty trying to give what they see as "clear direction" but their "clear direction" simply does not intersect with the messages the wider faithful are picking up as to what God is saying to the human family.

A third possible cause of this confusion over the core message I suspect comes from liturgical and devotional intransigence. It's a confusion about "how we talk to God". The main culprit here I suspect was Pope Pius X. There is some evidence that the decline may have actually begun with his pontificate but the effects were disguised for a period by the upheaval caused by the First World War. Liturgy is the chief means by which we give form to our communications to the Divine. It's well-spring ought to be "the people" and a very natural and organic upwelling of the aspirations and hopes of the people. Around the time of Pius X, possibly earlier, liturgy, and a way of thinking about prayer and communication with God, was imposed on the people. The form that was imposed does appeal to a small sector of the population but it has been decisively rejected now by the vast majority of the population. Again this is all related to the "confusion of the core objective" factor I am discussing here.

My personal view is that at the heart of the confusion both in liturgical form and core belief are two ultimately incompatible views as to what the core objective of faith is and how that objective ie realised. One of these views is clearly articulated the other is not. The view that is clearly articulated is what amounts to a hoop-jumping view. As I have explained before salvation is presented as something akin to the model of achievement that we present to a young child at the earliest stages of schooling. There is a set of rules they have to learn and obey. If they learn and obey these rules they will eventually be promoted into the next grade. Most people reject that view today but a small proportion of the population cannot see any other model other than that one.

In secular education different models have emerged but somehow these do not seem to have been translated across to provide an alternative model for the faith quest. I totally reject the hoop-jumping model today. It is only useful at the very earliest stages of life and education and in fact, I increasingly suspect, it is not even relevant there any longer based on what we now know. The alternative presents the faith endeavour as "a whole of life learning experience". It is a process of literally learning "to think and act" like God through the model of Jesus Christ. This is a long, long way from a hoop-jumping endeavour. The present dispute in Australia on the issue of Primacy of Conscience lies somewhere at the heart of the disparity between these two points of view. It is fascinating watching the tap dance the clerics are involving themselves in at the moment in trying to resolve this dispute. They'll try like billy-o to resolve it and trying to save the face of the person who projected the dispute onto the national (possibly international) agenda. In the end though the only lasting resolution will be when they choose one alternative or the other. The two choices are not an either/or choice though. One leads to truth the other does not. Scraping the teaching on Primacy of Conscience, which would suit the cohort who have controlled Church communications for the past 150+ years, might finally set the Church on its final spiral into remnant status. Sticking with the teaching, and articulating what it really means — even for the learned man who wanted to scrap it — might at long last indicate that the international leadership is finally "getting with the program" of what the wider world has been discerning has been wrong with the present agenda that has failed so abysmally.

Next week...

I'll continue this commentary next week by examining in further detail the two other factors that I believe help explain the present crisis, and which need to be addressed if the institution is to turn this long-lasting communication crisis around. The first of these is the allocation of resources to communication and the second is the effective "silence" that has been imposed on the great majority of pastors to the point today where the Church has effectively been "shut down" and no longer even tries to communicate in language that intersects with the vast majority of her flock.

While these three major systemic obstructions continue in Church communication I do not believe it would matter how many Catholics John Allen induced to see themselves as "spokespersons" the underlying problem will not be resolved. In fact, inducing an even greater "confusion of voices" to be raising their volume as "spokespersons" would be likely to exacerbate the presently problem rather than to solve it. Before any of us can be effective "spokespersons" we need some fundamental agreement as to what we are actually being "spokespersons" about! There seems to be enormous confusion today as to why we call ourselves Catholics and, at its ultimate purpose, what our Catholicism is actually meant to achieve.

Blessings, Tom

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART II

LINK: Here's the link to John L. Allen's column: ncrcafe.org/node/657

PHOTO CREDIT: Spire image sourced from stock.xchng. Photographer: Craig Jewell Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Tom Scott is the pen name of the editor of Catholica, Brian Coyne.

Email this article to a friend	Post your feedback in our forum

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Tom Scott can be contracted at:
Tom Scott <tomscott@catholica.com.au>

[Tom's Take Archive]