Pope Benedict XVI on the "True Council" and the Media

   Just over a week ago, the pope gave a final talk to the priests and seminarians of the Diocese of Rome, where he gave what many are calling his "final master class".  As a paretus of the Council, a bishop, cardinal, and pope, he has a perspective on the Church over the last fifty years which has a lot to tell us about how we have managed to enter into conversation with the "modern world", where we still need work, and where the "modern world" has drawn a line in the sand, that we are not supposed to not cross, except at our peril.

   As I have been recently reflecting on the role of the media in our contemporary (notice, I don't say 'modern',) society, there's a lot of truth here.  The council and the Church at large is in search of the truth (fides quarens intellectum), plodding and erring as it does, but through the sure guidance of the Holy Spirit in every age, no less our own.  The pope understands the "council of the media" to have a much different agenda and end, not the City of God, but the City of Man... the hermeneutic of politics rather than the hermeneutic of faith.

   Benedict offers a very instructive contrast to make his point: the teaching of the "true" Council vs. the teaching of the media with regards to his most beloved subject: the liturgy.  My highlights below are in bold:

I would now like to add yet a third point: there was the Council of the Fathers - the true Council - but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council in and of itself, and the world perceived the Council through them, through the media. So the immediately efficiently Council that got thorough to the people, was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And while the Council of the Fathers evolved within the faith, it was a Council of the faith that sought the intellectus, that sought to understand and try to understand the signs of God at that moment, that tried to meet the challenge of God in this time to find the words for today and tomorrow. So while the whole council - as I said - moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of journalists did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics. The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of whatever faction best suited their world. There were those who sought a decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the Word for the "people of God", the power of the people, the laity. There was this triple issue: the power of the Pope, then transferred to the power of the bishops and then the power of all ... popular sovereignty. Naturally they saw this as the part to be approved, to promulgate, to help. This was the case for the liturgy: there was no interest in the liturgy as an act of faith, but as a something to be made understandable, similar to a community activity, something profane. And we know that there was a trend, which was also historically based, that said: "Sacredness is a pagan thing, possibly even from the Old Testament. In the New Testament the only important thing is that Christ died outside: that is, outside the gates, that is, in the secular world". Sacredness ended up as profanity even in worship: worship is not worship but an act that brings people together, communal participation and thus participation as activity. And these translations, trivializing the idea of the Council, were virulent in the practice of implementing the liturgical reform, born in a vision of the Council outside of its own key vision of faith. And it was so, also in the matter of Scripture: Scripture is a book, historical, to treat historically and nothing else, and so on.

And we know that this Council of the media was accessible to all. So, dominant, more efficient, this Council created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialized ... and the true Council has struggled to materialize, to be realized: the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real strength of the Council was present and slowly it has emerged and is becoming the real power which is also true reform, true renewal of the Church. It seems to me that 50 years after the Council, we see how this Virtual Council is breaking down, getting lost and the true Council is emerging with all its spiritual strength. And it is our task, in this Year of Faith, starting from this Year of Faith, to work so that the true Council with the power of the Holy Spirit is realized and Church is really renewed. We hope that the Lord will help us. I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious. Thank you. 

   The instructive point here is that we are all conditioned by the lenses we use to see the world, but those lenses themselves are not truth. Truth is perceived and identified and loved by people of faith who rightly interpret the messages and the signs and the challenges of the times. Those who can only see the Church as a mere social structure, where power is distributed and exercised, where order and coercion is maintained, where human beings control their own identity and destiny... they will always be disappointed as they see the Church in her authenticity and in her reality stand up and breathe fresh air upon the world through its teaching and its understanding of the human person in relationship to God. One only has to look at the angst spent against the Church in the recent debates against same-sex 'marriage' and the decades-old battle against abortion. These debates tend not to be a battle from enlightened ideas from "the world", so much an array of ideologies calling into question the legitimacy of the Church to even enter into the conversation. Read the comments on your local newspaper's blog whenever an article about the Church appears if you want to understand what I mean. This battle is personal, but we cannot back down from that battle.
   To apply a political lens to the Church, and to see the Church exclusively as a social reality results so readily in the misery, not only of closed seminaries and convents and weak liturgy as the pope points out, but may I add, the misery of poor Mass attendance (both in numbers and in fervor of those who are there), failing Catholic schools, a demoralized clergy, diminished human and financial resources, and a scattered (and scattering) laity. Benedict is getting at, most pressingly, the way a media hermeneutic has depleted the "imagination" of the faithful such that we don't even understand our own signs and symbols, prayers and practices... we have allowed ourselves to become unmoored in the muddy waters of contemporary, worldly concerns. I would dare say that reacquisition of this "spiritual imagination" is the great gift and the integrating force of the Council, in which Benedict finds and offers hope for the future.
   This is not to say that the political lens of the media is an invalid way to look at the Church in the contemporary world, but it cannot be the only way or even the main way if we are to be people of faith. Faith does not cover up the wounds and scars of past failures, but it can offer redemption to these wounds if allowed to permeate them. Faith is not an easy answer... it is, in reality, the hardest answer to underlying the question of the Church and its relationship to secular society. Faith engages all the reason the human person can generate, all the hope the human person can endure, and all the life and vitality the human person can offer. "Take up your cross and follow me" is not a game for wimps. It is not a bargain for those who think they can hold something back for themselves, just in case. It requires all that we are and all that we can offer.
   Without faith, there is no way that we can see the Church except in the most pathetic, dimmest light. I think Paul said something that pulls at least tangentially here: "If only for this life we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all." (1 Cor 15:19) As the machinery gears up for the conclave and the seasonal press coverage of the Church, remember the reference point of the media and the need for the gift of great faith to interpret the events correctly and fully. A week after the press circus leaves Vatican Square and the new pope gets on with the business of being the spiritual father of more than 1 billion Catholics, it will be the faith of the people that sustains him and the Church. The faith which will propel us to whatever the Spirit has in store for us next.

--Fr. Tom Donovan