Catholic news editorial

This year the annual Neophyte Mass falls — as is customary for the local Church — on Ascension Sunday. Some 500 adults, having now come into full membership of the Roman Catholic Church, will gather around Archbishop Edward Gilbert at the Cathedral for the Mass. In a formal way, the celebration marks the end of the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) process for those who were baptised, confirmed or received into full communion of the Church this Easter. The various stories of conversion, the accounts of how these men and women came to discern the call of Christ, obeyed his voice and were transformed in the process are a vital tonic for the Church. Every story is unique. But a common thread will without doubt run through each one: the influence of Catholic brothers and sisters on the lives of each neophyte. They have come to participate in the life of the Church through the words and actions of Christian brothers and sisters.

Ascension Sunday is also World Communications Day. Participation and community are critical to the life of the Church. But participation is also a societal need conditioned and made more pressing by the Internet and other modern means of communication. The media affect human perception, understanding and values. They do not constitute, in their various forms, loose wrappings for the institutions of society.

The media determine not only how information is imparted but what citizens make of the information. They make possible hoaxes such as The Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas and also create the climate for the public’s fascination. But these tools of communication also bring communities together and make participation possible across various boundaries of society. The encyclical Communio et Progressio describes the media as “gifts of God.”

Bodily Presence

In the last four decades the Church has regularly commenced on the modern “means of social communication” — a term it uses to refer to the mass media — particularly through the work of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and the messages for World Communications Day. It has emphasised the need for the Church to develop its own media but it has also understood the need for formation, both for professionals in the field as well as for the public.

In his first message for the Day, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of the “profound impact” of the media on the mind and reiterates that “contemporary media shape popular culture.” Here at home, in early August, the Caribbean School for Catholic Communication will once again host its one-week workshop aimed at training Catholics to use media and to become more aware of how media touch people’s lives.

In 1977, the late media theorist Marshall Mc Luhan, a convert to Catholicism, doubted that the Church, even after Vatican Council II, had come to grips with its problems, problems occasioned by the rapidly changing media environment. The outspoken critic said, “the Church is always out of place . . . Sometimes way ahead, sometimes way behind.”

He spoke of the difficulty of an incarnate Church having to deal with a “dis-incarnate” world, a world where visible and bodily presence was becoming less and less important for communication. Today, with the Internet and cellular phone the world is even more “dis-incarnate.” But this has not made people less desirous for physical presence. Online places of worship do not satisfy the need for participation and fellowship.

The resilience of the RCIA and other associations built on small-group sharing, which have come into existence since Vatican II, suggests that the present culture has created an even greater need for real community and that the Church is right in its response.