The Church and the Media: Talk at Book Launch

by Chris Chatteris SJ · September 9, 2009

There’s a story concerning the writing of books that I frequently use when preaching retreats. It is by Fr Carlos Valles, the Spanish Jesuit who spent his life working in India. A Jesuit writes a book which is a wild success. He is tempted to write another but is worried that this second book will bomb, but he goes ahead and it’s another success. Thereafter, each time he puts out a volume he goes into agonies about how it will be received and eventually he realises that he needs some help on this problem. So he goes to his best friend in the Jesuits and asks him straight out: ‘What do you think of my books?’ The friend just laughs and replies, ‘I can’t answer that because I never read your books!’

The moral of the story is that authors need friends who don’t read their books, but just appreciate them for their friendship. A beautiful thought, and as I look around the room today I am moved to see friends without whose friendship life would be pretty well intolerable. However just to add, that today, in the context of a book-launch, I appeal to my friends to be friends who do read one’s books!

Alexander McCall-Smith of The Number One Ladies Detective Agency fame (you know Precious Ramotswe, the ‘traditionally built lady from Botswana), was once asked by someone at the Cape book fair what she should do if she thought she had a book in her. He looked alarmed and replied that she should go immediately to the doctor and be X-rayed!

I frequently feel I have a book in me one is sitting in my computer at the moment called Vocations and What to Do with Them, on accompanying young people who think they have a vocation to the priesthood and/or religious life, or there’s maybe a novel about an NGO in a failed state, or a collection of spiritual talks, or a series of short stories or a collection of poems.

However this book on the Church and the media was not one that I felt I had in me. Rather it came as a commission from Cluster Publications in Maritzburg. This is a danger of being on publishers’ boards: eventually they ask you to write a book. As usual people know you better than you know yourself and the prime mover here, Sr Sue Rakoczy, had noted that I am a hopeless media junkie and made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Not that the book wrote itself. I quickly realised that the Church and the Media is a massive, ever-developing and ultimately uncontrollable field. All I had was a hundred pages and I tried to touch on issues as disparate as the power of advertising over the media to the handling journalists! And this is where the secret is to have a good editor, which I did in Sr Sue. She had been the supervisor for my master’s thesis, so I knew the demanding quality of her work!

If you ever had doubts about the importance of a good editor I can recommend a very long and hilarious article (it’s on the internet) entitled Black Day for the Blue Pencil by Blake Morrison who argues that although editors are today an endangered species because they no longer have enough time and they are sometimes regarded as mere proof-readers who must not be allowed to pollute the pure spring of the author’s inspiration, some of the best writers (TS Eliot for example) admitted that they could not have done what they did without them. He cites the example of one intrepid editor (who also edited Hemingway) who cut a writer’s novel down from 1.2 million words to a mere 450,000 and made it into a best seller. Unfortunately later on the author became paranoid about his editor, ditched him proclaiming that he was going to show the world that he could write alone, and promptly died. So the moral of that story is always be nice to your editor.

Editors make suggestions about what should be excluded from and included in your book. Even with the best editor one always finishes with the sense that it isn’t the last word and there should have been other things in it. I certainly feel that way about The Church and the Media.

For example, I wish the news about Vatican Radio going into advertising had come out while I was still writing. I do say quite a lot about advertising but Vatican Radio taking ads would have been a good illustration of how all-pervasive advertising is in all the different media. I argue that in fact many of the media would not exist without advertising and that there is a sense in which advertising is so powerful that we should perhaps view it as a medium in itself.

Hence I tend to agree with media commentators Detweiler and Taylor that although we do need to be critical of the sex and violence content of the media, we have perhaps missed the fact that, because of the power of advertising in the media, what we really need to be aware of is the extent to which all media these days (Vatican Radio included now) are relentlessly persuading us to shop till we drop. And what we need is a critical theology of consumption in to enable us to handle modern advertising.

I should perhaps say at least something about the general thrust of the book. It is largely inspired by Pope Paul’s pastoral instruction on the media of 1971, entitled Communio et Progressio. He was trying to show us how to put into practice the Vatican II document on the media, Inter Mirifica. For ‘further reading’ this cannot be bettered in my view. In it Paul VI develops the image of the media as ‘a great round table’ to which all, the poor included, should be invited. It’s a wonderful, inclusive, even democratic, image and one which holds out the hope that the media will really take everyone seriously and work not just to inform, educate and entertain, but really be an instrument for social progress.

Something which caught people’s eye in the advertising ironically is the suggestion that the Christian Churches collaborate to produce a ‘Christian Al Jazeera’. Now I doubt if this is going to happen any time soon, but it might make us think a little. If you look at Al Jazeera you will find a really professional TV channel, truly international in reach, which represents a Muslim view of the world. But note that despite the pervasive suspicion in much of the world about Islam and religious belief in general, Al Jazeera is generally trusted. That seems to me to be an amazing achievement. We could do well to ask ourselves how Al Jazeera does it and whether we could do it ourselves. After all, the church’s image is not in the greatest shape in the world today. So my suggestion of a Christian Al Jazeera is a playful way of teasing our minds into thought about what makes media coming from a religious background successful, and what does not.

A word of thanks. I couldn’t have written The Church and the Media without the many people I consulted and whom I’d like to thank Fr Emile Blaser of Radio Veritas, Gunther Simmermacher and Chris Moerdyk of the Southern Cross, Else Strivens of Trefoil, Peter James-Smith and Sr Paula of this bookshop are the local people to whom I am indebted. Many thanks to you all for your help!