Virtual Communion. Katherine G. Schmidt
with Thompson in offering as his final reflection the image of the city as a crucial aspect of the eschatological vision.
64. Andrew Root, “A Screen-Based World: Finding the Real in the Hyper-Real,” Word & World 32, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 241.
65. I will assume, for the purposes of reviewing this literature, that online interaction is “disembodied.” Later, I argue that the category is complicated, if not ultimately unhelpful.
66. “Our Digital Future,” Editorial, America (February 17, 2014), accessed online, http://americamagazine.org/issue/our-digital-future.
67. One of the most well-known authors on transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil, who proposed singularity as humankind’s telos in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
68. Root, “A Screen-Based World,” 242.
69. Graham Ward, “Between Virtue and Virtuality,” Theology Today 59, no. 1 (2002): 58. I find the use of “face-to-face” to be more specific and more helpful than “disembodied,” though it too has problems.
70. Ibid., 59.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 61.
73. Ibid., 62.
74. Ibid., 64.
75. Ibid., 65. Here Ward is drawing on Sean Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage Publications, 1998).
76. Ibid.
77. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web? 79.
78. Ibid., 49.
Ecclesial Perspectives on Media and Communications
The Magisterium of the Catholic Church is no stranger to the questions posed in the preceding chapter. The church has long had an interest with the modes and effects of human communication, as well as with the consequences of technology. In general, magisterial documents have taken a cautiously optimistic approach toward the progress of communications and media. According to Gaudium et Spes, part of “reading the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the gospel” is being honest about the obvious shortcomings and problems of modern life. The document balances its enthusiasm with statements like the following:
[T]he modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred. Moreover, man is becoming aware that it is his responsibility to guide aright the forces which he has unleashed and which can enslave him or minister to him. That is why he is putting questions to himself.1
The guiding vision for the church’s official commentary on media and communications, then, is a realistic vision of both its possibilities and its pitfalls. What follows is a review of ecclesial perspectives on three interrelated questions: technology, media, and communications. The least amount of attention is given to technology in explicit terms in the ecclesial documents. The church has been more explicit about addressing the questions of media and communications, questions they have tended to consider together under the category of “social communications” following the Second Vatican Council.
The question of “where to begin” on these topics is especially difficult. In 1766, Pope Clement XIII promulgated the encyclical Christianae Reipublicae in which he dealt primarily with the dangers of anti-Christian publications. He wrote that the Holy See is required to see that “the unaccustomed and offensive licentiousness of books which has emerged from hiding to cause ruin and desolation does not become more destructive as it triumphantly spreads abroad.”2 Already in 1766 we have a document about the effects of technological progress (printed text and global travel) in the realm of communications on social relationships and personal morality. By mentioning this eighteenth-century document, I mean to promote a broader notion of media than one usually finds in both informal and formal discourses on the subject. It is a perspective that I believe is not only faithful to the church’s approach to media for the last century or so but also more helpful than somewhat popular but narrow approaches for understanding our current media environment.
Each of the texts reviewed in this chapter has its own historical context and any number of other important contextual factors (debates over true authorship, ecclesial politics, implicit audiences, etc.) that are beyond the scope of the current project. While I present these texts chronologically, it is by no means a sufficiently rich account of their historical contexts.3 Instead, the aim of this chapter is to discern the major themes in this body of church teaching, so as to elucidate, in a general way, the approach the church has taken toward issues of media and communications.
Taken as a whole, these ecclesial perspectives have variously focused on the church and the Incarnation as the theological loci for the question of media. To be sure, the former has been the most pronounced in these texts, while the latter has been more implicit and only emphasized in the latter part of the twentieth century. At its heart, this body of church teaching is about communion. Magisterial interest in communications revolves around a desire for true human community by virtue of shared imago Dei and salvation in the incarnate Word. Before the Second Vatican Council, the church focuses on communion within the context of the church alone, while after the council this communion extends outward to include the “whole human family.” Even the renewed focus on evangelization in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI can be understood in the context of this outward-looking desire for communion.
For the church, social communications, media, and their necessary technologies are always to be understood in terms of communion. Various means of communications are measured against the standard of the communion found in the sacramental life of the church. They are also judged for the degree to which they contribute to this communion. There are many characteristics of this communion, including virtue (Pius XI); art that is “subjected to the sweet yoke of the law of Christ” (Pius XII); building the common good (Second Vatican Council); self-communication in love (Pontifical Council for Social Communications); human freedom (John Paul II); upholding marriage and family (Benedict XVI); and engendering an encounter with Christ (Francis). As they draw on the Incarnation and the church to understand human communication, church leaders have had as their standard and their end “relationships among human beings with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.”4 To consider communications technology is to enter into much larger conversations about culture, politics, and economics. Therefore, although the most relevant texts come at the end of the twentieth century, this review thus includes sources that span the century as well as precede it.
Pre-Conciliar Ecclesial Perspectives
Ecclesial sources from the early twentieth century written on communications and technology focus primarily on the cinema and radio. Since its inception, film has garnered the attention of various religious authorities, including the Catholic Church. During the 1930s and 1940s, the church exercised its influence in this area through the Catholic Legion of Decency. As Anthony Burke Smith notes, “The Legion represents perhaps the most successful endeavor undertaken by the church to influence American culture.”5 It was a massive effort not only for censoring objectionable film but also for creating a culture of “decency” with regard to film within communities through the use of the Pledge in parishes.
The impetus for the Legion of Decency in the United States came from a more universal effort within the church to combat the moral evils of film, radio, and even books. In 1936, Pope Pius XI promulgated the encyclical Vigilanti Cura. The primary focus of Vigilanti Cura is the moral hazard of films. Objectionable films “are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family.”6 The Incarnation (any mention of Jesus, really) is noticeably absent from the text. The church, however, looms large. Bolstered