Catholic Academy for Communication Arts Professionals at 1645 Brook Lynn Dr., Ste 2, Dayton, OH 45432-1933 US - The Future of Catholic Communications
| The Future of Catholic Communications |
by Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco Presented at the Catholic Media Convocatin 2006, Nashville, TN Current Media Use Self-identifying Catholics in the Unsurprisingly, Catholics who attend Mass at least once a month are more likely than those who attend less frequently to use religious and spiritual media. Who Will Use Catholic Media in the Future? I want to emphasize this last point. It is an obvious truism that the future of Catholic media is very much bound up with the future of the Church as an actively believing community. And his disciples who are likely to use Catholic media are the ones who are going to church every Sunday. Certainly the new technologies offer possibilities hitherto unavailable. For example, can the Web liberate the diocesan newspaper from the constraints of marketing through parishes? Can it use the Web to reach Catholics who are unattached to any parish – very likely to be young Catholics.? Can it help fill the pews rather than only serving those who are already there? A specific group within youth (and adults as well) is the growing Latino population. In what ways will Catholic media keep this population connected to the Church? We have already seen a noticeable shift in religious allegiance both at home and in this country among this population. How do Catholic media contribute to sustaining their Catholic commitment? One of my West Coast cousins told me once that he was a paper boy for his diocesan newspaper which naturally became part of his adult life. What is the new form of involving youth in our communications endeavors? Many Catholic communicators have devoted the bulk of their efforts to youth. Such a commitment is going to be hardly less important in the future. And for the sake of its own vitality in the future, Catholic media cannot be content to reach only those who are already there. -- “the choir,” as they say. The choir needs to be served. But Catholic media are hardly going to make the contribution that they are capable of making without attracting the attention of the wider culture. There has been so much navel-gazing within the Church, so much harping on our internal problems, that our communications endeavors seem to concentrate solely on an internal dialogue and not on their potential to be the means of inserting the Church into the conversations going on in the surrounding community on the issues facing our pluralistic society. Catholic Media and Polarization I know that there is nothing really new about this. Growing up in Our age seems to me to be an age of polarization in which I define myself as “not-you -- Thank God.” However many people may deplore polarization, it seems to provide a lot of us with a degree of emotional satisfaction. Is it the future of Catholic media to exacerbate or to narrow the corrosive, debilitating polarization that exists in scoeity and the Church. Before I go on, let me say that that there are many serious issues in the Church that allow legitimate debate, and the media is all the more interesting for them. I am not talking here about debate which can successfully clarify issues. I am talking about the hostile talking past each other which does not want to engage the other’s thought but only to suppress it. To sum up very briefly, two additional points which deserve talks in themselves, first, Catholic media are obviously affected by the trends in the surrounding culture. For example, in our era, newspapers -- not just Catholic newspapers -- are struggling. As for electronic religious media, in the past they relied on the concept of broadcasting in the public interest. Broadcasters once supplied time on air for important voices in the community, often religious voices. That availability of air time has disappeared almost entirely with de-regulation and the demand that every minute of air make a profit if possible. Technology With regard to its future, how will Catholic media take advantage of the technological developments we are seeing? What an amazing and culture-changing advance moveable type was. We look with admiration at those huge Guttenberg bibles preserved in various places, and then we realize that we can now read Scripture off a tiny screen on a device held in the palms of our hands. That is also awesome, but at what point does this awe give way to taking a treasure for granted? I said not long ago in public that I had become so dependent on my Blackberry that it was probably a technical violation of my promise of celibacy. But the impact of his technology and of cell phone is enormous. One feels endowed with something akin to the divine omnipresence to be available to others in almost any part of the world at all times. Putting up the Jesus Decoded Web site provided the USCCB an extraordinary voice, and I don’t mean just that it caught the interest of the traditional media. No sooner was it up than the Mexican Bishops’ Conference was volunteering to translate it into Spanish. We made contact all over the world. I was in The extremely democratic Internet may be the answer to the distribution issues which Catholic producers face. At the CCC, we put a great deal into streaming video as one way to stay in the field of video production without the normal worries about distributing product when hardly any outlets are open these productions. We saw some success with news-related events, such as the release of the first Charter implementation report and, later, the John Jay study, and also memorial video at the time of the death of John Paul II. We have had uneven success with features, As a child of the age of films produced in Cinemascope and splashed across huge screens in glorious Technicolor, it's hard to believe that people can enjoy what they see on tiny screens, but it is apparently true that they do. I have a friend who loves The Matrix, but he has only seen it on a computer screen. It hard to believe, especially since I saw it at the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue in Washington which, I hear, is one of only about 3 screens of that enormous size left on the East Coast. But convenience and also multitasking are trumping size, and "screen time" is no longer refers primarily to the TV screen. If we can pick something up at a more convenient time on the Internet, or an iPod, or pick it up in a way that doesn't interrupt our doing something else, that may mean we won't watch it on TV. No longer are we tied to one time and place because media are realizing the importance of cooperating with this convenience factor. So video news reports which in the past one had to purchase from a video service at great expense are now often available for no charge. As a result, all of us in various sectors of Catholic media share a great interest in not letting the Internet be corralled by large commercial interest. And the Web and e-mail really can make the Church a network of communications that no longer depends on traditional secular media. The Church certainly has the capacity to be media-independent. We can get church news down to the person in the pew with the utmost ease today technologically. If we did have this kind of mass internal communications, it would almost surely allow us to deliver our message to the traditional media more effectively than we have ever been able to do before. The main question is, Do we really want to create this kind of network? These technologies provide marvelous advantages and rather major challenges. Just to mention one of the latter: As we can extend out reach outward to people, these technologies also give them the chance to respond or to contact us in the first place. Transparency has never been more practicable, and so it will probably be even more in demand. The panel my want to discuss some of these possibilities which technology is opening up for us. Four Models For the remainder of my presentation, I want to talk not about technology but several ways in which we can conceive of the Church’s presence in communications. They are: 1) Full-scale Media Operation: The Church has its own media products and uses its own means of distribution; 2) Partnership: the Church produces its own media products but it seeks cooperation with existing secular means of media for distribution; 3) Media Relations: the Church’s resources are put into media relations. The Church’s main concern is to get its message carried in the secular media effectively and accurately; 4) Media Literacy: The Church educates the Catholic public in thinking critically about all media. 1) The first model is a daunting one. It is probably more realistic in print and radio than TV. There have many attempts to create Catholic national broadcast or cable entities – TV or radio – with most failing for lack of a financial base. However, successful evangelical radio broadcasting does make one wonder why the Catholic Church cannot do likewise. One reason why we do not may be a lack of a real entrepreneurial sense. 2) The challenge under the second model, Partnership, is the profit-oriented nature of the media industry. But it is possible to develop relationships, especially between dioceses and local cable stations, for instance, or a producer and cable TV channel. I must also mention PBS, because there has been a very successful partnership with “The Face: Jesus in Art” and the upcoming “Picturing Mary.” 3) The third model, Media Relations, appeals to those for whom the expense of production and distribution seems too great for the resources which the Church has available to it. One of my dreams when I took this job was to encourage media to use the staff of the Bishops' Conference as they would a think tank. For this reason I started a "source book" to alert media to specializations at the USCCB. This never worked out as I envisioned it. I think we needed to push it much more with follow-up calls. But also I found internal constraints. It is a bishops' conference after all, and many on the staff defer to bishops to speak to the media. 4) Under the last model, the Church emphasizes media literacy. Whether it is chosen as the primary way for the Church to encounter the media, it is something that needs to be embraced far more enthusiastically than we have done so far. Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio about the media being “for many the chief means of information and education, of guidance and inspiration in their behavior as individuals, families and within society at large.” Clearly in a world so dominated by media, media literacy is essential. Our people must be able to take a critical view of the media, instead of being trapped as passive consumers. These models don’t have to be in competition. Elements of all these models will undoubtedly be involved in the Church’s media future. But in particular places a scarcity of resources may mean that choices will have to be made among them. I now invite my fellow panelists to respond to these remarks or to offer insights of their own in the future of Catholic media. ###
Even if we limit ourselves only to those who attend Mass every Sunday, we are looking at a number approaching 20 million people.
As we know, this population is served by a Catholic media almost equally diverse. Much of it is local in origin: diocesan newspapers/magazines, diocesan radio and TV, and now diocesan Web sites.
Much non-diocesan media have been organized by religious communities: magazines and TV programs and now Web sites. One change that seems clear is that there is less electronic media from these sources.
And there are media which are neither (or no longer) diocesan or religious order media -- mainly print media. And, of course, there are interfaith media in which Catholics participate -- mainly electronic media.
Do Catholics use the media available to them?
The USCCB Committee on Communications commissioned CARA to do a media use study to find out the extent to which this vast population uses religious or spiritual media. Here are some of the findings:
A quarter of the respondents said that they had read their diocesan newspaper in the last six months. Each percentage point is estimated to represent 500,000 adult Catholics; so that’s approximately 12.5 million Catholics.
Twenty-eight percent have watched a religious or spiritual television program. The same percent have read a religious or spiritual magazine or newspaper. Twenty-three percent have read a religious or spiritual book; 12 percent listened to a religious or spiritual radio program; 11 percent visited a religious or spiritual Web site; 10 percent purchased a religious or spiritual book; and nine percent watched a religious or spiritual DVD or video.
So while nothing like a majority of self-identifying Catholic use religious or spiritual media, millions do. However, the majority of such users are older Catholics -- in itself a chilling fact in terms of the “future of Catholic media.”
Without a renewal in that community, without younger members replacing “retiring” older community members, one can hardly expect Catholic media to retain their vitality. Their very survival is in question if users depart with no replacements.
So if the future of Catholic media is dependent on the renewal of the worshipping community, can they assist in that renewal?
Then there’s the question that many institutions and society itself ask: How to reach the young? The young often seem remarkably impervious to taking up a role in their community even simple a role as voter. And every generation worries whether the “younger generation” of any given era will ever “grow up.” Yet the young somehow or other also manage to be among the most active of activists in any given time and place. Certainly a lot of Catholic youth are galvanized through our school system. Can our Catholic educational system be a place where our young people learn to appreciate Catholic media? What about those who are not in the school system? Can Catholic media help to reach them?
One of those problems is “polarization.” In the secular media there is a trend I have heard described as the growth of the “media of re-enforcement.” Instead of using media to learn about our world, many people use only that media which will re-enforce what they already think – “fair and accurate” meaning “I know what I like and I like what I know.” This trend may be a reaction to the failure of the media to be truly objective thus inducing a skepticism that causes people to trust only other like-minded people.
But new technology gives this media of re-enforcement the potential to take on ever more narrow and personal forms. The era of mass media brought with it a sense of a planet shrinking into a global village. But further advances in technology have potentially put in every person’s hands the capacity to be a global communicator. In the last presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of the “blogger.” Traditional media, by the very fact of covering this new phenomenon, helped create a formidable competitor. Suddenly there are these voices in cyberspace who have to be reckoned with. Some are important because they have backgrounds and experience that make them credible. Some simply assume their inherent importance: “I blog; therefore I am.”
Catholic media have hardly fallen behind secular media in this regard. We have long had many media outlets to which people of only one point of view subscribe or listen. To use only the names of prelates beyond mortal judgment: one periodical may have developed a cadre of readers who would fall into a swoon to read a good word about the late Cardinal Bernardin in its pages; another would have received a slew of cancellations if it had said something nice about the late Cardinal O'Connor.
How genuinely “catholic” are a media which cannot embrace the entire spectrum of the leaders of one’s own church? But I have to admit that this seems to be an ancient tradition. Ever since Christ said, “By this shall all that you are my disciples: your love for one another,” Christians have been looking around for an excuse not to.
Is the future of Catholic media to be a niche media inside the Church with an outlet to serve every shade of Catholic opinion which all add up -- well, in fact, they don't add up. What contribution can we make to the world either in term of the common good of society or its ultimate salvation if we are a group squabbling over issues significant only to ourselves and not even to all of us?
Second, the long period of change through which the Church has gone has had its impact on Catholic media. If we have survived an era in which everything seemed up for grabs, we perhaps are now in an era in which some Catholics seem to think that the Catholic media need be only an extension of the Catechism, with no need and certainly no obligation to engage the culture as if it had something to say that is worth our listening to.
