Dissent & communion
Steinfels, Margaret O 'Brien
just to both. Media saturation is a fact of the modern world. The church need not respond in a subservient fashion to that fact, bending to glib prophets of an electronic age. Baroque Catholicism...
...I quote from his book, The Splendor of the Church: "The church...really makes herself by the celebration of the mystery...
...My second caveat about indictments of the media is that sometimes I think they really disguise the hierarchy's unwillingness to come to terms with the realities that a great many among the Catholic laity are well-educated and their thinking is outside the hierarchy's direct control...
...We Catholics, all of us, need to become smarter about how we deal with them and live with them...
...The result is simplification, dramatization, highlighting of conflict, and a wrenching of dissent from its context...
...Catholics speak Spanish or Vietnamese or Haitian Creole...
...That is a topic for another article...
...Let me end with some other words from de Lubac, a man who was a dissenter, was silenced for his dissent, and yet who saw his sense of the church come to fruition in the work of Vatican II...
...the holy and sanctifying church builds up the church of the saints...
...There is, for example, the mega- phone effect...
...or, as Henri de Lubac, S.J., has put it: "The church produces the Eucharist, but the Eucharist also produces the church...
...There is no way in which new questions and challenging opinions are going to be kept from the ears of Catholics...
...In this regard, it is scrutinized more than many other institutions, and it pays dearly therefore in loss of credibility for its every sign of resistance to free inquiry and debate...
...Baroque Catholicism successfully employed image and ceremony, rather than concentrating on the private word as did various streams of Protestantism...
...Any dissenting voice may be am- plified, so that it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish marginal views, whether on the right or the left, from convictions reflecting serious theological study or enjoying the support of large groups of the faithful...
...Today we all speak media, in a dozen distinct dialects...
...The media sword is, of course, two-edged: fringe opinions can needlessly disrupt the composure of the faithful, or serious questions that should rightly disrupt our composure can be dismissed as sensationalism or media mischief...
...Added to these structural constraints and competitive pressures is an ideological factor...
...And then we are sent forth in the name of the Lord...
...We might say that the Sunday liturgy both confronts us and comforts us with ultimate meaning in a world suffering a crisis of meaning...
...But I believe the best starting point is our most common and direct experience of communion, the Sunday liturgy...
...The Mass is, I think, both the first work of the church and the last, the opening up and the summing up, the beginning and the end of what we are supposed to be doing...
...Competition for readers or audiences demands matching stories...
...N one of this dispels the problems that the media create in the relationship between dissent and communion...
...The Mass gathers us, and our work, our joys and our sorrows, our dissent and our assent, and helps us to reflect on them, to pray over them, to offer them up...
...We need to practice a pedagogy and politics of persuasion...
...If robust theological discussion of issues that deeply concern people is stifled in Catholic institutions, Catholics will simply draw on the discussions in institutions where the Catholic tradition may be less present...
...Perhaps more than anyone, he gave a secure foundation to this idea of communion ecclesiology, one we are still trying to achieve...
...Journalism inherits from the muckraking era an ingrained skepticism toward authorities and a suspicion that pronouncements of ideals generally mask hypocrisy...
...H owdo we bridge all of these chasms between dissent and communion, some of our own mak- ing, some of the culture's...
...to do mischief, be an annoyance, to live our faith in this world, this United States with all of the ambiguities, conflicts, and tensions inherent in our kind of culture...
...In the Eucharist not only is the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but in that transformation, the people too are transformed, our work given meaning, our sorrows blessed, our lives reordered and reoriented, our hearts turned from stone to living flesh...
...Entertainment in the media, by contrast, often pan15 ders to conventional morality, all the while spicing its performances with as much of the forbidden and titillating as it can get away with...
...Newspapers and broadcasting work under extreme constraints of space and time...
...Persuasion is central to the question of dissent and communion...
...The mystery of communication is rounded out in a mystery of communion—such is the meaning of the ancient and ever-fresh word 'communion...
...It is naive or disingenuous for Catholics who dissent not to recognize that this is the media context in which they act, and deliberately to do their best to foresee, prevent, or compensate for the kinds of distortions that may result...
...Yet the church's commitment to persuasion remains hobbled by a hankering after control and censorship...
...Dissent, whether of the left or right, will be perceived and presented as confirmation that the church is a brittle fossil or an authoritarian throwback...
...News coverage and entertainment frequently converge in viewing conservative religion, especially evangelical Protestantism or official Catholicism, as the bulwark of a morality experienced as either hypocritical or constraining, constricting life rather than protecting or enhancing it...
...Catholics as much as non-Catholics absorb these images of the church, and they are not images likely to foster communion...
...The church still labors under a long history of silencing critical and questioning thought, a history sometimes simplistically entrenched in the mythology of modernity...
...Much of the megaphone effect arises not so much from the ill will of the media as from its structure...
...Today Catholic teaching does not have to be refashioned for MTV, but the reality of MTV and network news and sitcoms and talk radio and elite newspapers has to be part of Catholic teachers' calculations just as much as is, say, the reality that significant numbers of U.S...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
