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Every index shows this pope is not getting more attention from Catholics as he is nearing the end
of five years as pope. Starting with he attendance at events in St. Peter's, which has dipped to an
embarrassing low of 10,000 average for his Wednesday audiences. And while one does not wish
to start a new year chronicling mishaps, this news comes to us, as Antonio Socci points out, from
a rubric today in Repubblica's Friday opinion page, entitled "Catholicism in crisis should
also take note of Auditel" (this is Italy's equivalent of the Nielsen ratings).
I shall translate, for now, the excerpt Socci chose:
Pope Francis has been the protagonist of a program entitled Padre Nostro (Our Father) [One wonders which ‘father’ is meant here – il papa, or God] aired every Thursday evening since Oct. 25, 2016, on TV2000, the so-called ‘bishops’ TV’ [it is the TV network of the media conglomerate belonging to the Italian bishops’ conference]. It is hosted by don Marco Pozza, chaplain of the prison in Padua.
The program had been accompanied by a grand and lengthy publicity barrage on every possible organ of communication, from the press to radio, and don Pozza’s appearance on all the major national TV channels. But despite all that, it has attracted so few viewers as to be embarrassing.
Confirming, above all, what the TV audience data for the past 3 years have been attesting: Pope Francis on TV gets half the audience that Pope Benedict XVI had. The latter had an average audience [for his Angelus and Wednesday catechesis] of 20% of viewees, whereas his successor has been registering an audience of 9-12%. [Gee, whatever happened to the most popular man who ever walked the earth, as the media inflated his image at the start? - contributing to the impressive turnouts at St. Peter's in 2013, but which then steadily got cut in half every year since then.]
If as McLuhan famously said (the late Canadian media guru who was a practicing Catholic and was highly disapproving of microphones on the altar and had a profound disgust for ‘contemporary’ Masses), “the medium is the message”, what does it say when people tune out and switch to another program when watching a ‘talking’ cassock on TV? There must be a reason!
BTW, The writer is no lightweight - a Carmelite who holds doctorates in civil and canon law, he is a judge in the Church's regional tribunal for Lazio. But Fr. d]Di Giacomo has been a Vaticanista on the side, writing for La Stampa and Il Messaggero during the Benedict XVI years, but who has now apparently switched to La Repubblica.
He first came to my notice when he wrote a stunningly unfair and subjective article entitled "Behind the papal flop in Brazil" comparing Benedict XVI's trip to the three visits John Paul II made there - yet in his article, all he cited was the Mass attendance at Aparecida (without giving the comparative Mass attendance when John Paul II was there). (In reporting today on Bergoglio's TV 'flop', however, Di Giacomo does not rely on his own perception but was presumably using figures from Auditel.) The curious thing about that 2007 article was that the second part was very positive, starting out this way:
But he was also an extraordinary preacher, calm and lucid, witness of truth and evangelical freedom.
In his speech to the bishops at Aparecida, it was immediately evident that the Pope had set aside, without consideration, their preparatory texts, and imposing on them, with impressive realism, a confrontation with facts and not with theories.
Your Church, Benedict XVI told them bluntly, is in crisis. Sociologically, you still have the numbers, but as a church, you risk disappearing. This is something that Latin American prelates do not say.
This given, not spoken of by the bishops of Latin America of whatever theological current, has three objective levels, for Benedict XVI: confronting the real challenges of the Latin American Church, rather than dreams of the past or messianic visions; knowledge of the Christian proposition through the cultural mediation of the great social documents of the Church; and the need to envision and establish adequate ecclesiastical structures on the Continent....
[This analysis resonates today because Jorge Bergoglio, who chaired the committee that prepared the final document for Aparecida, has since proudly claimed Aparecida as one of his great moments before becoming pope, and the media has largely concurred with him. Even if there are even less Catholics now in Latin American since 2007.]
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