ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

New media test Vatican's digital fluency
by John Thavis



VATICAN CITY, Jan. 30 (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI recently urged the world's priests to make better use of new media, but in his own backyard the digital revolution is still seen as a mixed blessing.

The Vatican Web site remains largely a repository of printed texts, displayed on pages designed to look like parchment. And despite more than a decade of discussion about making the site interactive, www.vatican.va continues to provide information in one direction only: from them to you.

Some Vatican agencies have embraced the digital possibilities, notably Vatican Radio, which offers online broadcasts, podcasts and RSS feeds along with photos and print versions of major stories.

Other departments prefer to fly below the radar. The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, for example, has posted exactly one new piece of information on its Web page over the last three years. {That's not fair, and it's also false - since the Congregation operates the FIDES news agency which can be accessed from their pages!

The more valid reproach is that most of the Curial organizations, including the Secretariat of State and the CDF, do not yet have their own websites, when even the Prefect of the Pontifical Household has its own subsite on the main Vatican site.]

The impression that the Vatican is slow on the draw when it comes to Internet possibilities was confirmed recently when a "Vatican" Twitter feed turned out to be someone impersonating the Vatican. It was a fairly innocent case of Twitterjacking, but begged the question: Why doesn't the Vatican have a real Twitter feed?

Among the few Vatican officials willing to tackle these issues head-on is Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. He met with reporters to present the Pope's World Communications Day message Jan. 23, which called for better use of new media, and said it held lessons for everyone engaged in Church ministry.

"The risk is that our sites will merely be places where information is posted, and not a real meeting ground," he said.

Archbishop Celli has helped prod the Vatican toward more interactivity. Last year, his council designed and launched a special Vatican Web site, www.pope2you.net, to bring the Pope closer to a younger audience. It includes iPhone and Facebook applications, and visitors have used the site to send nearly 300,000 e-cards to their friends, each bearing a snippet of Pope Benedict's teaching.

Last Christmas, pope2you.net invited people to send personal photo-and-text Christmas greetings to the Pope, which were then posted to a linked Flickr account. The response was overwhelming, with messages from believers and nonbelievers all over the world.

In January, Archbishop Celli was busy putting together a representative selection in dossier form for the Pope.

When the Pope released his communications day message urging priests to take advantage of digital media, Archbishop Celli did something that reversed the usual hierarchy of communication in the church: His site encouraged young people, after reading the papal message, to click on a link and send it directly to their pastors.

[What about someone in the Vatican Press Office with a master list of all available e-mail addresses of priests, bishops, parishes and dioceses - who can do a mass e-mailing everytime there is a papal text or Church message to be shared with the universal Church?]

Archbishop Celli, a 68-year-old Italian who has spent his entire career in the Roman Curia, knows that communication novelties are usually introduced very gently at the Vatican. He readily concedes that at his age, when it comes to new media he may be part of the problem.

[On the other hand, there are a few cardinals who became Web-savvy early on, like Cardinal Dario Castrillon-Hoyos, now 80, and Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who was president of the Pontifical Council for Ministry to Health Care workers. Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston has been blogging since 2007, and Cardinals Angelo Scola of Venice, and Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, have very active personal websites different from their diocesan sites.]

"We have our own digital divide. I think of myself. I was not born 'digital'. I belong to a certain era that feels more at home with a book," he told reporters.

He said, for example, that he was amazed at the Kindle but found it hard to imagine himself "sitting in a chair and watching the pages of a book stream past on a small screen."

The challenge for the Church is not to encourage young priests and seminarians to use digital media, because they're already doing so, he said. The bigger problem is convincing middle-aged and older priests to embrace these possibilities.

Archbishop Celli said his council is also willing to tackle an even more sensitive issue -- in many ways, the core issue -- of Vatican communications: the question of language.

"This is a topic we need to face in an explicit manner. Many times we speak, but in a language that is no longer comprehensible," he said. He said that's something that may be the focus of an upcoming plenary session of his council.

Speaking the language of new media is a delicate issue precisely because many Vatican officials do not trust these media to get it right about the Church, or to engage people at a more than shallow level. They doubt whether the language of the Internet is compatible with the beauty and depth of Catholic theology and liturgy.

Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of the communications council, launched what might be called a trial balloon on the question of language in a recent article in Cultures and Faith, a publication of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

While acknowledging the risks of superficiality, he said people should remember that the language of the digital culture would not substitute for dogma or theology, but would be employed primarily to make an initial point of contact with those who are far from the faith.

[Precisely! There is a hierarchy (or pyramid) of communications levels in any field. In the Church, the Pope's messages rank at the top of that pyramid. Fortunately for us, we have a Pope who is distinguished for the clarity of his message. But it then becomes the duty of the lower levels in that pyramid to spread it downward promptly and effectively - and that is the great deficiency so far in the Church's communications structure. That, and the fact that many bishops and priests continue to act and speak as though they know better than the Pope and the Church in general!]

As things stand, he said, the Church relies too much on texts, which often use a vocabulary and forms of expression that are experienced as "unintelligible and off-putting even by sympathetic audiences."

[You can't change the 'language of the Church' overnight. Besides, there is a place for that 'official language' - in the original documents, and in the official Acts of the Apostolic See (where everything is reported in Latin as the official basis for any textual references]. And it is right that the original documents should be made available ASAP.

It then rests with the Vatican Press Office to make clear and understandable news reports - also ASAP - based on those texts and documents, but mostly with the news agencies and Vatican correspondents who are primarily responsible for the version, often quite reductive, of the texts and documents that gets to be disseminated among the general public - with all the errors, distortions, shortcomings and generally unappetizing language we are familiar with, from which even the Catholic news agencies are not exempt.]

He said the Church needs to recognize that today's younger audience is fluent in "a language rooted in the convergence of text, sound and images," and will quickly move on if their attention is not immediately engaged.

Msgr. Tighe said that, ultimately, the church should look to the example of Christ, who spoke to his contemporaries with words, stories and parables, as well as deeds and actions. The Church can also turn to its rich heritage of art and music, he said.

"Just as the stained-glass images of medieval cathedrals spoke to an illiterate audience, we must find forms of expression that are appropriate to a generation that has been described as 'post-literate,'" he said.

[One way to do that right away is to introduce - systematically as well as adjunctively - the most attractive elements of Church tradition in art, sculpture, architecture, music and literature through the Web! Many bloggers already do so, to some degree, but the Vatican communications structure itself has to devote an organized effort to it.

The possibilities are infinite. The Vatican interactive sites devoted to the Pope could have daily vignettes featuring, say, a saint, a church, a work of art, the Gospel of the day, a poem, a hymn, a religious festival, local religious folklore, etc - all lend themselves to illustration with existing visuals from the Church tradition and with the appropriate passages from 'music by the masters' to accompany any kind of visual! And you would never run out of subjects or content! It is also important, of course, to identify (and provide relevant information)every illustration or piece of music used, because nothing is so frustrating as to be struck by a visual or a piece of music and not know what it it is!

For instance, illustrate the Pope's homilies or catecheses with visuals that amplify and enhance - but do not distract from - the message.]


There's also a problem of the great damage that could result from mis-translation - in this case, an Italian website mis-translating a statement made by a Polish bishop and causing great uproar unnecesearily:


Polish bishop calls Holocaust article
a 'complete misunderstanding'
of what he actually said



Krakow, Poland, Jan 29, 2010 (CNA) - Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Tadeusz Pieronek of Sosnoviec, Poland, has roundly denied having referred to the Holocaust as “a Jewish invention.”

Calling it “a complete misunderstanding,” he explained that the Italian website Pontifex, which quoted him in an article this week, clearly failed to get his meaning.

“I was referring to the fact that the Jews have created the term ‘Shoah’ to define the tragedy that didn’t have a precedent in history,” Bishop Pieronek told ANSA news agency. “The journalist interpreted my words as if I said that the Jews had invented the Shoah.”

The bishop asked increduously, “How could I have said something so absurd?”

“Everyone who knows me knows my position on the crimes of the Nazis and on the horror of what happened,” added the 75-year-old former spokesman of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, who has previously publicly condemned anti-Semitism.

The original article posted on Pontifex last Monday, reported under the title of “The Shoah, an invention of the Jews,” that Bishop Pieronek had made other incendiary statements, including, “undoubtedly, the majority of those who died in the concentration camps were Jews, but also on the list were Poles, Gypsies, Italians and Catholics. So do not steal this tragedy in the name of propaganda.” The article has since been pulled from Pontifex.

The article also quoted him as saying that “they, the Jews, have a good press, because the powerful have the financial resources - extremely powerful with the unconditional support of the United States. And this promotes a kind of arrogance, which I consider to be unbearable.”

[I don't know how the bishop actually expressed himself in Polish - was he as combative as the translation sounds? - but he does make valid though highly 'politically incorrect' points in the above two paragraphs:
1) That the Jews were not the only victims of Nazi barbarism. In a recent post about the Pius XII controversy, I pointed out that the total killed in World War II was as many as 62-78 million by the latest historical data, of which 20-25 million were military dead from both sides, which still leaves 37-53 million civilian victims. Germany itself lost 6.5-8 million of its citizens, of which 5.5 million were soldiers. The figures do not excuse the planned extermination of a whole race in any way, but they do provide some perspective, at least, and show that the Nazi bloodlust was not confined to the Jews. In this case, the Poles themselves lost six million citizens in the war, half of whom were Jews.
2) American Jews did have, and probably still have, vast influence on the US media simply by owning most of the big names, like the New York Times. But this may help them insofar as Holocaust-related stories are concerned - no MSM outlet in the US would dare be politically incorrect about the Shoah in any way - but not about Israel, where the liberal media are generally pro-Palestinian.]

Upon being informed of the Pontifex article, the bishop criticized the site for “the manipulation of (his) words in an unauthorized interview.”

Following the Polish bishop’s reaction and the disappearance of the article from their website, Pontifex rebutted by posting a message on Thursday calling for Bishop Pieronek to publicly recognize the alleged comments as true within 10 days or face “legal action for defamation.” [???? Something's not right there!]