Frank Sheed wrote in his Theology for Beginners:
We look at the bread the priest uses in the Sacrament. It is white, round, soft. The whiteness is not the bread, it is simply a quality that the bread has; the same is true of the roundness and the softness. There is something there that has these and other properties, qualities, attributes - the philosophers call all of them accidents. Whiteness and roundness we see; softness brings in the sense of touch. We might smell bread, and the smell of new bread is wonderful, but once again the smell is not the bread, but simply a property. The something which has the whiteness, the softness, the roundness, has the smell; and if we try another sense, the sense of taste, the same something has that special effect upon our palate.
In other words, whatever the senses perceive - even with the aid of those instruments men are forever inventing to increase the reach of the senses - is always of this same sort, a quality, a property, an attribute; no sense perceives the something which has all these qualities, which is the thing itself. This something is what the philosophers call substance; the rest are accidents which it possesses. Our senses perceive accidents; only the mind knows the substance. This is true of bread, it is true of every created thing. Left to itself, the mind assumes that the substance is that which, in all its past experience, has been found to have that particular group of accidents. But in these two instances, the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the mind is not left to itself. By the revelation of Christ it knows that the substance has been changed, in the one case into the substance of his body, in the other into the substance of his blood.
The senses can no more perceive the new substance resulting from the consecration than they could have perceived the substance there before. We cannot repeat too often that senses can perceive only accidents, and consecration changes only the substance... The accidents, then, remain; but not, of course, as accidents of Christ's body. It is not his body which has the whiteness and the roundness and the softness. The accidents once held in existence by the substance of bread, and those others once held in existence by the substance of wine, are now held in existence solely by God's will to maintain them.
For years, I have been pondering a question: Is it possible to photograph the Holy Eucharist? Obviously, it is possible to stand before a monstrance and host and press the button on a camera; but is the resulting image a photograph of the Holy Eucharist? I believe that it is not.
A photograph is something that captures on film or in pixels a single accident of a thing - its appearance. It does not capture its substance; obviously, a photograph of a fish is not a fish. But the empirical properties of a fish do correspond to its substance; a fish looks like a fish, tastes like fish, smells like a fish, is the same size as a fish, weighs as much as a fish.
But the Holy Eucharist, the accidents do not correspond to the substance. They are entirely different. A device - whether a ruler, a scale or a camera – that measures or describes an empirical property of the host measures or describes bread alone. The Holy Eucharist does not look like this any more than Jesus Chirst is less than an inch in diameter and less than an ounce in weight. The result of aiming a camera at a monstrance is not the Holy Eucharist - and more importantly, it is not a photograph of the Holy Eucharist. It is a photograph of bread.
Of course, a man looking at the photograph may adduce its identity from context, just as he will recognize what is depicted in a painting of the Last Supper, an engraving of the Mass of St. Gregory, or a statue of St. Norbert trampling the heretic Tanchelm, monstrance in hand. But no man, when venerating one of these images, would think he were doing anything but venerating an icon; no man would think he were adoring the Blessed Sacrament. And still photographs have, to my knowledge, given no greater confusion than paintings, prints or statues.
However, video cameras aimed at the Holy Eucharist and broadcasting their images on television and over the Internet have caused far greater confusion, and present a theological and pastoral problem that will grow at pace with technological development; there has been an almost complete absence of serious discussion about it. Given the dangers, such discussion is due.
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I have heard, more than once, that the Church should have great success in its New Evangelization, because Catholicism is a visual religion and contemporary society is also visual. Even Cardinal Ratzinger has made the claim:
Today more than ever, in the civilization of image, the sacred image can express much more than the word itself, given that its dynamism of communication and transmission of the Gospel message is exceedingly effective.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 - to look at its dull, minimal painting, sculpture and 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 pictures, but specifically moving pictures, that interest contemporary man. Even the static works of art ubiquitous in contemporary society - 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 lines 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 often 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 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 within a defined, rectangular area; anything static 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 a television station broadcast a Mass from St. John Cantius Church 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 a bishop’s prohibition of broadcasting televised ad orientem Masses from his diocese. This was obvious anti-traditional petulance, and rightly 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.
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In my most ornery moments, I opine 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 Daniel contra mundum on this point, and I can understand certain arguments to the contrary.
I can understand the desire to broadcast 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. Bringing the Blessed Sacrament to the homebound in a pyx is infinitely more important than broadcasting the Mass on television.
The benefits of watching a televised Mass are catechetical and aesthetic; a man may benefit from listening to the homily, meditating on the words of the ordinary and propers, hearing the chants, 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, much confusion might be avoided and the same benefits gotten were Vespers or Lauds or some other nonsacramental liturgy televised instead.
The phenomenon of the "home-aloner" - the Catholic who never attends Mass, but who religiously watches one broadcast on television or recorded on videotape as a substitute - is well-known. The phenomenon - so utterly modern in every way - ironically is present among traditionalists disgusted with the New Order of Mass, who watch videos of The Most Beautiful Thing This Side of Heaven rather than dignify the liturgical absurdities of their local parish with their attendance. That the very people protesting modern novelty and the degradation of the sacraments would accept a technological substitute for Jesus Christ indicates just how deeply the false realities of modern media have penetrated the contemporary mind.
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Even more troubling than the televised Mass in the new - and yet rare - practice of "online perpetual 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 perpetual 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 neuter it entirely.
A picture appearing on a computer screen is not the Holy Eucharist. It is not even a picture of the Holy Eucharist. It 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, for it supposes that the appearance of the image in some way corresponds to the nature of the prototype.
A man cannot bow before a sculpture of a flamingo, and claim that the honor he pays to it passes on to St. Andrew. To venerate St. Andrew through a sculpture, a sculpture that resembles St. Andrew is necessary. An icon, however much it may be but a puzzling image in a mirror, at least reflects things that really happened, things that really were seen. The reality of the incarnation and the eyewitness of the saints have been used to justify the painting of the face of God ever since iconography first needed a theological apology. St. John of Damascus wrote:
For it is clear that when you see the bodiless become human for your sake, then you may accomplish the figure of a human form; when the invisible becomes visible in the flesh, then you may depict the likeness of something seen; when one who, by transcending his own nature, is bodiless, formless, incommensurable, without magnitude or size, that is, one who is in the form of God, taking the form of a slave, by this reduction to quantity and magnitude puts on the characteristic of a body, then depict him on a board and set up to view the One who has accepted to be seen.and:
If we were to make images of human beings and regard them and venerate them as gods, we would be truly sacrilegious. But we do none of these things. For if we make an image of God who in His ineffable goodness became incarnate and was seen upon earth in the flesh, and lived among humans, and assumed the nature and density and form and color of flesh, we do not go astray.The fact that God took on the form of a human body makes possible His depiction in a circumscribable image; but had He not assumed the nature and density and form and color of flesh, such depiction would indeed be idolatrous. In the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a different reasoning applies; it is not done so that honor may pass on to a prototype, for the Blessed Sacrament is the prototype Himself. Here God does not take on a visible form through which men's eyes might glimpse something of His divinity; rather, He hides entirely under the accidents of the host materials.
It may be objected that iconography often employs symbolic forms (such as animals) that do not correspond to 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.
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In recent decades, churchmen have falsely assumed that that modern media are morally 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 compatibility or incompatibility with 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 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. In his later rôle advising the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, he was able to advance this truth in a few documents, but these were ignored. In the current efforts for a New Evangelization, any medium is employed indiscriminately; the same tired fallacies about the independence of medium and message are endlessly repeated.
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 the Eucharist and Mass Media 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; thousands of pious Catholics, desiring to pay homage to the Blessed Sacrament, are instead made to worship pixels on a computer screen.
This is not the Real Christ.