It is a signal occasion when a Pope sends a circular letter to
all the world’s bishops. Usually such letters are classified as
encyclicals (the Greek cognate of the Latinate “circular,”) and
they are expressions of the magisterium, or definitive teaching
authority of the Catholic Church.
Last week Pope Benedict XVI sent a most unusual
letter to the world’s bishops amounting to an act of
contrition and a confession of fallibility. A thousand years
after the first Gang nach Canossa, another German leader
is barefoot in the snow, but this time it is the Pope.
Benedict seeks to clarify the reasons why he had remitted the
excommunications of four bishops who had been ordained without
Vatican approval by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had
dissented from the modern liturgy and other reforms of the Second
Vatican Council.
The letter notes that before his election to the papacy, Benedict
had been closely involved with efforts to reconcile various
sub-sets of Lefebvrists with the Universal Church, some of which
efforts were successful. “I myself saw, in the years after 1988,
how the return of communities which had been separated from Rome
changed their interior attitudes; I saw how returning to the
bigger and broader Church enabled them to move beyond one-sided
positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could
emerge for the whole.”
He also expresses regret and embarrassment over the circumstance
that he had offered his gesture of attempted reconciliation to
the Lefebvrist bishops and their followers without having known
that one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, is a Holocaust
denier and plainly an anti-Semite.
The letter is startlingly personal, un-magisterial,
un-bureaucratic. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Benedict himself has
rent the temple veil and invites us to pay attention to the man
behind the curtain. The Pope lays bare his personal hurt
feelings. “At times one gets the impression that our society
needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be
shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone
dare to approach them — in this case the Pope — he too loses
any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without
misgiving or restraint.”
This letter deserves reading in its entirety. Meanwhile this
article will focus not so much on the controversies of the
Lefebvrists and Williamson but on the issues of communication,
organization, and management in the papal office. Of the many
remarkable statements in the Pope’s letter, certainly not least
are those acknowledging a shortfall of competence in
communications and information-gathering:
I have been told that consulting the information available on
the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the
[Williamson] problem early on. I have learned the lesson that
in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater
attention to that source of news.
The Pope also wrote:
Another mistake, which I deeply regret, is the fact that the
extent and limits of the provision of 21 January 2009 [the
lifting of the excommunications] were not clearly and
adequately explained at the moment of its publication.
Note the use of the “I” and the “we.” Like John Paul II, Benedict
discards the “royal we” so often used by Popes in times past. He
uses “I” to refer to himself as one man but resurrects the “we”
to signify the entire Vatican bureaucracy — including Benedict.
The letter was simultaneously an expression of humility and of
authority, containing as it did an extraordinary public
dressing-down of the Apostolic Palace’s porporati by the
Man in White. Like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, the Pope is telling the
Roman bureaucracy: we have met the enemy and he is us.
Admitting there is a problem is just the first baby step toward a
remedy. Now what is to be done?
The Pope, the bishops and Catholics everywhere would serve the
Church well by brushing up on the work of the Marshall McLuhan
(1911-1980) a devout and orthodox Catholic who was insightful and
even prophetic in his writings about the new electronic
communications media.
McLuhan converted from “a loose form of Protestantism” to
Catholicism in 1937 as a 26-year-old working on his doctoral
degree in English from Cambridge. He cited the writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas and G.K. Chesterton as key influences in his
conversion. McLuhan loved the Tridentine Latin Mass but accepted
the vernacular Novus Ordo when it was introduced in the 1960s.
During the 1960s McLuhan by virtue of his visionary
pronouncements about the revolution in new media became for a
short while a pop celebrity, but he was a much deeper intellect
and a much more conservative personality than that status would
imply. He was devoted to the Catholic magisterium, including the
encyclical Humane Vitae condemning contraception. All of
McLuhan’s studies of modern media were grounded in his efforts to
update and apply the Aristotelian-Thomistic principle of “formal
cause.” Technologies and media as “extensions of man” also become
environments whose effects are powerful in shaping our
perceptions and behavior in large part because the environments
themselves are almost imperceptible. McLuhan was a punster and
was fond of quoting James Joyce: “As for the viability of
vicinals, when invisible they are invincible.”
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.)
