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Years before the pontificate of the world-traveling and ever-televised Pope John Paul II, McLuhan had stated that instant mass communications meant that the Pope could exercise his magisterial role anywhere, not just from the centralized bureaucracy of Rome. And while he regretted the demise of the Tridentine Mass, he observed that the advent of the microphone and electric sound systems, by changing the auditory environment of worship, had done more than the liturgical modernizers to doom the Old Rite.

The Holy See has had a hit-or-miss relationship with the work of McLuhan over the years. Pope Paul VI appointed McLuhan to a Vatican advisory council on social communications, but according to McLuhan's son Eric, this "meant little other than receiving in the mail from time to time a notice of a meeting (always to be held in Rome) or some such. My father tried several times to strike up a correspondence with someone, anyone, on the committee. He was anxious to be of some service and to help them with the study and understanding of media. His efforts attracted, unfortunately, no response, which was a source of great disappointment." Last year Eric McLuhan met Pope Benedict in audience when the younger McLuhan gave a thoughtful lecture at the Pontifical Gregorian University on modern electronic communications' tendency to turn people into discarnate "information nomads." Still, the Vatican bureaucracy does not seem to be paying much attention.

If these efforts have not yet yielded much result, there is still the opportunity to read Marshall McLuhan's reflections on the Catholic faith and his advice to the Church. Eric McLuhan collected some of his father's most significant writings on religion into a volume called The Medium and the Light, published in 1999. Eric McLuhan wrote a superb introduction to the book, offering context that often can be missed when reading works in Marshall McLuhan's own aphoristic and sometimes eccentric style.

The book presents this in a 1977 interview with U.S. Catholic magazine: "You cannot have goals in an acoustic, non-visual world. You want a role: you don't want a goal. The Catholic Church has a role: salvation." And from the same interview: "The Pope is obsolete as a bureaucratic figure. But the Pope as a role-player is more important than ever. The Pope has authority. After all, if there were only three Catholics in the world, one of them would have to be Pope. Otherwise there would be no church. There has to be a teaching authority or else no church at all."

In an article in The Critic in 1973, also reproduced in the book, McLuhan said:

The conditions attending the exercises of the magisterium of the Church in the twentieth century are such as to present an analogue to the first decade of the Christian Church. There is, on the one hand, the immediacy of interrelationship among Christians and non-Christians alike in a world where information moves at the speed of light. The population of the world now co-exists in an extremely small space and in an instant of time. So far as the magisterium is concerned, it is as if the entire population of the world were present in a small room where perpetual dialogue was possible. So far as the traditions of the Church are concerned, the present situation puts all knowledge and authority on an oral and personal basis. The habit of written communiqués and doctoral promulgation, which is inevitable under slower conditions of inter-communication, becomes an embarrassing impediment. Again, whereas the Church has through the centuries striven for centralism and consensus at a distance from the faithful, the electrical situation ends all distance and, by the same token, ends the numerous bureaucratic means of centralism. The magisterium is now experienced simultaneously in the entire visible Church. A complete decentralism occurs which calls for new manifestations of teaching authority such as the Church has never before expressed or encountered.

McLuhan's meditations resonate with John Paul II's practice of extensive travel and use of television, and also with an intriguing doctrinal point in John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on Christian unity, Ut Unum Sint. In this letter, John Paul II wrote that he was willing to "find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renounces what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation."

According to McLuhan and likeminded thinkers, the new situation is the radically decentralized social/political/ecclesiastical environment of instant global electronic communications. The Medium and the Light and more widely known McLuhan works such as Understanding Media are excellent guides to help the Pope and other Catholics to interpret rapidly changing "signs of the times."

(Mr. Duggan is lecturing in communications and politics at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City.)

topics:
Pope Benedict XVI