I have heard many times the claim that the Catholic Church should have great success in her New Evangelization, because Catholicism is a visual religion and contemporary society is also visual. But to call Catholicism a visual religion is a meager assertion; it is no more visual than any of a thousand kinds of paganism. It would be more accurate simply to say that human beings are visual animals. The visuality of Catholicism is only remarkable because the religion's most obvious alternatives in the West - Protestantism and Secularism - are rather inhuman.
And contemporary society, judging by (for one example of many) its reductive architecture, is not very visual at all. Its interest in visual things is almost entirely concentrated on its movie, television and computer screens; it is not any images, but specifically moving images, that interest contemporary man. Even the static pictures now ubiquitous - advertisements, posters, billboards - are meant to be looked at while walking or driving or rapidly flipping pages in a magazine; they may not move, but their frame of reference does, which gives the same subjective result. In contrast, a study taken in 1980 indicated that most visitors look at a painting hanging in an art museum for about ten seconds. The same study, taken in 1997, lowered the time to three seconds. Contemporary man does not love images; he loves motion.
I believe that much of the iconoclasm of recent decades can be blamed on the influence of television and (especially) cinema. Cinema is the most convincing false reality yet devised by technology. The intensity of the imagery, the sophistication of the editing and the ever-more impressive special effects fill the modern mind with an inventory of powerful, nearly unforgettable images. Regardless of his life experience, every man now knows what a cavalry charge looks like. He knows what a dinosaur in the flesh looks like. He knows what an exploding planet looks like, even though no man has ever seen a planet explode. These images become the references for his visual imagination; when he pictures death, judgment, heaven or hell, he pictures something resembling a cinematic special effect he has seen.
Traditional iconography and traditional liturgy are symbolic; to appreciate them, a man must recognize that his senses are unworthy of the greatest realities, and that hieratic and canonized types, arrangements and gestures are needed to suggest them. It is a logic entirely contrary to that of cinema, which attempts to show anything and everything "as it really looks".
A lifetime of moviegoing creates in a man a sense of spectatorial entitlement. He who pays ten dollars to see a movie feels that he is owed certain production values and conventions of direction and editing. Any important dialogue should be recorded audibly, and dubbed or subtitled if spoken in a foreign language. Any important actions should be filmed from unobstructed angles, close enough so that details may be seen. If the moviegoer is unable to see, hear or understand something, he feels cheated, and criticizes the movie. When he attends Mass, these same expectations come with him - and the very idea of a silent Canon, of untranslated Latin, of veils and screens, of a priest "with his back to the people" becomes offensive.
Marshall McLuhan perspicaciously blamed the loss of Latin liturgy on the introduction of the microphone. After resisting for five centuries the Reformational idea that Mass was "something to be heard", Catholics at last embraced the all-hearing principle as a result of expectations changed by technology. A century earlier, in his Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, A.W.N. Pugin predicted the eventual end of traditional church architecture due to the rise of an all-seeing principle:
If religious ceremonies are to be regarded as spectacles they should be celebrated in regular theatres, which have been expressly intended for the purpose of accommodating great assemblages of persons to hear and see well. It has been most justly said, that there is no legitimate halting-place between Catholic doctrine and positive infidelity, and I am quite certain that there is none between a church built on Christian tradition and symbolism and Covent Garden Theatre with its pit, boxes and gallery.
Nothing has done more to entrench the all-hearing, all seeing, all-understanding principle in the modern mind that the media of mass entertainment. Watching movies and television shows also trains men to observe phenomena in a specific way; the important things to notice are those that move, and move within a defined, rectangular area; anything else is ignored. Minds so formed, when taken to Mass, do not see statues or icons as things themselves revelatory, but regard them like potted plants to the side of the television set. They are apart from the action, so they are unimportant. If they are noticed at all, they are distractions that ought to be removed.
The video camera thus has stripped the altars, torn down every veil, made visible everything that tradition saw fit to hide. I remember one time that EWTN broadcast a Latin Mass from my parish in Chicago; I did not attend, as I was housesitting for my mother that day. I did watch on television, and noticed that the consecration was filmed from the very front of the south transept loft; it was obvious that efforts were made to find an angle from which the cameraman could get an unobstructed, closely zoomed-in shot of the host on the high altar.
Several years ago, there was a controversy over the former Bishop of Birmingham's prohibition of broadcasting ad orientem Masses from his diocese on television. This was obvious anti-traditional petulance which angered many people. But I doubt that it really mattered much anyway. To show the consecration close-up from a privileged angle negates the entire purpose of ad orientem celebration, and I have yet to see any televised Mass at which this was not done.
Personally, I believe that video cameras ought to be forbidden entirely at Mass, or at least turned off when the offertory begins - at the moment when, in ages past, the catechumens were expelled from the assembly. I am well aware that I am contra mundum on this point, and I can understand certain arguments to the contrary.
I can understand the desire to televise the Mass for the sake of the homebound and bedridden, but I wonder at times just how beneficial it really is. There is no virtual midpoint between attending Mass and not attending Mass. Watching television is not attending Mass. Mass is a sacrifice, and to participate in a sacrifice, one really needs to be present. The phenomenon of the "home-aloner" Catholic who does not attend Mass, but who religiously watches one on television is common enough (and not just among Sedevacantists; some of them watch EWTN) to suggest that the confusion that results from televising the Mass outweighs the benefits.
Those benefits are catechetical and aesthetic; a man may learn and be edified by listening to the homily, meditating on the words of the ordinary and propers, hearing the chants and watching the symbolic gestures of the ceremony. These, then, may move him to devotion, just as privately reading his Missal may move him to devotion. Catechesis and beauty are not the purpose of the Mass - indeed whenever liturgists make them paramount concerns, the liturgy is degraded. Catechesis and beauty are secondary benefits, but they are real benefits. As long as a man understands his watching a televised Mass as analogous to his privately reading his Missal, and not as analogous to his sitting in the pew at church, I do not begrudge him these benefits. Still, all the confusion would be avoided and the same benefits gotten were Vespers or Lauds or some other nonsacramental liturgy televised instead.
Even more troubling than the televised Mass is the new - and yet rare - practice of "online adoration": a video camera is set up before a monstrance, and live images are streamed through the internet, allowing men to "adore" the Blessed Sacrament from their personal computers. I can think of few things more bizarre and horrifying.
The promoters of this devotion insist that it is not meant to take the place of actual adoration in a chapel, but the very name "online adoration" indicates that the devotion is intended to be analogous to actual adoration. So does the use of a live feed from a video camera instead of a still image; monstrances, generally speaking, do not move, so the use of a video camera ought to be unnecessary. Were the purpose simply to comfort the viewer with the knowledge that the Eucharist exists, and is being adored somewhere, a still photograph or a painting would suffice.
But the contemporary mind formed by the cinematic experience thinks of a video feed - even a video feed in which nothing happens - as somehow more real than a still image; its use gives the viewer the sense that he is participating in something that is really happening, right now; that he is actually adoring. Any doubts that this is the intention are dispelled when reading the suggestions on one website hosting this devotion, describing how to use it:
Be with Our Lord, centered on Him wholly and completely. Sit in silence with Him - the Sacred Doctor of human hearts.When reflecting on the nature of adoration, the usual justification given for televising the Mass - making it accessible to the homebound, the bedridden, and those too busy or remote to attend conveniently in person - does not work. A televised Mass does not confer any sacramental benefit; it merely offers the secondary catechetical and aesthetic benefits of the Mass. With adoration, these secondary benefits do not exist; adoration has no content at all independent of the Real Presence. The only reason that a man goes to adoration is to adore.
I remember, several years ago, reading an article that called adoration the perfect antidote to television:
Another poignant use of Perpetual Adoration is as perhaps the premiere alternative to the mass media’s monopoly of our time and manipulation of our minds, especially through television and personal computers... Our mind is literally flooded with images until the shows practically overwhelm our senses and our ability to find any goodness or truth or beauty in what we are viewing. Similarly, browsing endless websites, entering random chat rooms, or spending hours on computer games can eventually lead us to deny the necessity to bear witness in the real world, if not the belief of His Real Presence in it.
Ironically, the above quote is attributed to the EWTN host Jeff Cavins - but it still makes all the sense in the world. Television is about visible fallacy, something that appears real but is not. Adoration is about invisible truth, something that cannot be seen but is present nonetheless. Worshipping the Holy Eucharist in silence is profoundly countercultural in an age filled with electronic sound and fury signifying nothing. But to present that presence as a digital image on a glowing box is to thrust it back into the realm of the unreal. To remove adoration from physical proximity to the Real Presence is to contradict it entirely.
A picture appearing on a computer screen is not the Holy Eucharist. I am not sure if it is even a picture of the Holy Eucharist. How can such a thing as "a picture of the Holy Eucharist" even exist; how can a device like a ruler or a scale or a video camera, capable only of describing accidental properties of length or mass or appearance, produce a description of anything but bread? This picture is electrons buzzing in a machine and nothing more. To adore it is to give the honor due to God to something that is not God. There is a word for that: "idolatry". And while most participants in "online adoration" lack the clear knowledge and intention to make them fully culpable, it remains true that idolatry, considered in itself, is the greatest of mortal sins.
A different justification might be attempted by arguing that this picture is analogous to an icon, and that the honor paid to it passes on to the prototype, the Holy Eucharist. But this formula of the Second Nicene Council does not here apply, because here God does not take on a visible form through which men's eyes might glimpse something of His divinity (as in an icon); rather, He hides entirely under the appearance of the host materials. We do not adore the Blessed Sacrament because it looks like God; we adore the Blessed Sacrament because it is God. To adore "a picture of the Holy Eucharist" is to adore something that neither looks like God, nor is God; in other words, to adore a thing unworthy of adoration.
It may be objected that iconography often employs symbolic forms (such as animals) that do not look like the incarnate forms of the prototypes honored - a pious pelican resembles Jesus Christ in appearance no more than a communion wafer. (The Lamb of God and the Evangelical Beasts are a somewhat different matter, as Christ and His gospel-writers were seen in such forms by human eyes.) Allegorical images of the Bread of Life may very well be part of this same imagery, as when false monstrances are incorporated into the decorative architecture of Baroque churches. But I am certain that the promoters of online adoration do not want the image seen on computer screens worldwide to be considered merely as an edifying symbol for Christ, akin to a painting of a pious pelican. For the adoration of an electronic image of the host not to be idolatrous, it must be qualified to the extent that its justifying purpose entirely disappears. For, after all, if it is just a symbol - to hell with it.
In recent decades, churchmen have falsely assumed that that modern media are neutral, and can be expected to produce the same results as traditional media when employed in a comparable manner. They have ignored the basic principles of modern media (and of all media), and failed to discern their effect on human behavior and understanding; they have failed to discern whether they help or hinder a man to believe and live the Gospel. Marshall McLuhan was disappointed by the failure of the fathers of Vatican II to critically evaluate modern media; the entirety of his writings demonstrated the obvious truth that media have inherent properties, and that it is the nature of a medium, more than the message communicated by it, that determines its effect on society. As his most articulate disciple, Neil Postman, summarized:
Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.In his McLuhan's rôle advising the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, he was able to advance this truth in a few documents, but these have been ignored. In the current efforts for a New Evangelization, Catholics are encouraged to use any available medium, whether television or Twitter, youth rallies or rock music, and assured that as long as they invest it with a Christian message, no harm will result.
Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a man with a television camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments... The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. Indeed, in the computer age, the concept of wisdom may vanish altogether.
Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence: The medium is the message.
Exactly what McLuhan would have thought of televised Masses and "online adoration" remains a matter of speculation; according to his biographer, he was preparing a lecture on Mass Media and the Eucharist but died before finishing it. However, when alive he wrote much that serves to warn those who would incautiously combine them:
When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer's moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favorable to Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be turned to a new Christ and mistake him for the Real Christ.St. Louis de Montfort once wrote:
A counterfeiter usually makes coins only of gold and silver, rarely of other metals, because these latter would not be worth the trouble. Similarly, the devil leaves other devotions alone and counterfeits those mostly directed to Jesus and Mary, because these are to other devotions what gold and silver are to other metals.Here is fools' gold; pious Catholics, desiring to pay homage to the Blessed Sacrament, are instead made to worship pixels on a screen. This is not the Real Christ.