MEDIA
The Appeal of the Pope

Breaking (Good) News
What is the serious disease that plagues the mass media today? Among the many diagnoses, an unexpected one comes from the Pope, who underlines how a “perverse mechanism” of operating doesn’t allow recognition of the sacred value of each man.

by Conor Dugan

As an inveterate consumer of blogs, podcasts, and various other media sources, I was particularly interested in Pope Benedict’s recent words on the mass media in his address on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. In the address, the Pope offers us a beautiful reflection on Mary’s place at the heart of the city and the Marian heart we must cultivate in our own relation to the world, especially social media. At first glance, the Pope’s references to the news and mass media may seem out of place, perhaps arbitrary, even a bit forced.  In fact, reading and reflecting on the Pope’s words, one comes to the realization that there is a deep synthesis between what he says about Mary (“The Madonna teaches us to open ourselves to God’s action, to look at others as He looks at them–from the heart”) and what he is calling us to with regard to the media.  This is all the more apparent when one notes the Pope’s general prayer intention for the month of January: “That young people may learn to use modern means of social communication for their personal growth and to better prepare themselves to serve society.”
As I read the Pope’s words, I believe he is doing what he always does, calling us to a deeper awareness of reality and the structure of the world.  Far from dismissing the media, the Pope is provoking us to go deeper, to ask the questions that we too infrequently ask about new technologies (and old).  It is often said that technologies and media such as the Internet are neutral entities that can be used for good or ill. As the argument goes, the question is our intention, the manner in which we marshal these things for our own use. But such thinking fails to see what my friend and mentor, David L. Schindler, constantly reminds us is the interior logic and form of things.  As Schindler has said with regard to television and computers, such things “are not neutral instruments. The form already shapes, favors, a certain kind of understanding of experience and knowledge. A computer, for example, emphasizes experience as acquisition. So the whole idea of embodied communication that takes time, that involves surprise, that has to be patient are missing from a computer, and likewise television. People complain about sound bites; but the point is that the medium itself inclines communication toward sound bites.”

Evil and the others. The Pope’s words are calling us to this same type of awareness.  Benedict states in his address that the “mass media tends to make us feel always as ‘spectators,’ as if evil refers only to others, and certain things could never happen to us.”  The Pope wants us to be aware of the way media shape us, the danger of becoming mere spectators, rather than seeing ourselves as protagonists and all of reality as a gift.  Here I am reminded of recent articles about Google and the way it shapes our thinking and research, pushing us toward a surface understanding of subjects and their connections rather than depth.  Thus, Pope Benedict follows his comments concerning the “mass media” with a warning of the risk that we will fail to see the depth and humanity of those in the city.  In a world of mass media, we can begin to “see everything on the surface,” he writes. People become mere “bodies, and these bodies lose the soul, become things, objects without a face, to be exchanged and consumed.” It is not that the mass media make us do this, but the interior logic of these media can predispose us to walk through the city–and the world–missing the depth and beauty that surround us.  They tend to push us towards abstraction and alienation.
Pope Benedict’s words also point to the need we have to be refreshed in the face of the banal nihilism that the news puts in front of us daily.  In this regard, the Pope’s words remind me of an experience over 10 years ago outside of Krakow at a Polish cultural center.  I was on the Tertio Millennio program run by Professors Novak and Weigel, and Fr. Neuhaus, who brought us there.The center’s director was a man whose eyes flashed with a deep fire of love and mysticism.  His center was a place of art and music and the beauty of the endeavor evident.  When he spoke, I listened. He spoke of the bombardment we undergo in this world, the magazines, newspapers, and other media that truly wear us down.  The Pope points to this danger when he talks of our need of Mary’s “beautiful news” in the face of the newspapers whose information can harden our hearts and darken our thoughts.

Our  bodiliness. The risk here is to see the Pope’s words as a simple rejection rather than a call to awareness.  But is the Pope rejecting the mass media?  Is he condemning the news media?  Hardly. Even as a young priest, the Pope preached that “the greatness of Christ’s message is, precisely, that He did not just speak about souls and of the beyond but that He spoke to the whole person in their bodiliness and their insertion in history and the human community, and that he promised the Kingdom of God to people of flesh and blood living among others engaged in that same history.” The Pope’s words aim at this bodiliness. But how then do we avoid these very real issues, issues that in our frenetic world we can so easily miss? By turning our gaze on the Madonna. As the Pope states, “Mary Immaculate helps us to rediscover and defend the depth of persons, because in her there is perfect transparency of the soul in the body. She is purity personified, in the sense that the spirit, soul, and body are in her, fully consistent between themselves and with the will of God.”  We must ask for the gaze of purity that Mary has.  We must learn to be child-like, first receiving all and contemplating our and “every human history” as a sacred gift. And we can learn to recuperate the good and the true that are present in the social media.