CathNews New Zealand

It has been reported that the regulations concerning media access to the discussions at the upcoming Synod assembly in Rome – first of two sessions that will be held over the next twelve months – have not yet been approved.

Journalists can only hope that the hypothesis of imposing the pontifical secret (the highest kind of confidentiality in the Church) on the deliberations will be rejected.

This is a very important issue for those who cover the Vatican, but also for all those – Catholics and non-Catholics – who will follow, more or less intentionally, the October 4-29 session of this Synod assembly on the Church’s future.

This is a very important event that has no precedent in the history of the Synod of Bishops, which Paul VI instituted in 1965.

Indeed, in some ways it resembles the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which spanned four sessions.

Vatican I and Vatican II: from still photos to live television

If the (First) Vatican Council (1869-70) was the council of newspapers and photography, and the pontificates between World War I and World II were in the age of the radio and of cinema, Vatican II was the council of television.

John XXIII was the first pope regularly on TV: when he visited the parishes of Rome and the prison near the Vatican, when he travelled to Loreto and Assisi, and when he signed – live on camera – his last encyclical, Pacem in terris.

At the time, the only mass media outlet in Italy was the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the national radio and television network funded by taxpayers and under the control of the country’s political parties.

It was the beginning of an alliance between Christian-Democrats and Socialists – the so-called “opening to the left”, which right-wing Catholics and Vatican officials loathed, but John XXIII actually welcomed.

RAI had a monopoly on the images of the Vatican at the time of Vatican II, and it kept it until 1983 when the Holy See created the Centro Televisivo Vaticano (CTV).

RAI had a very pro-Vatican II stance.

It offered a lot of programs, specials, and documentaries explaining the Council to a wide audience.

Not only did it feature interviews with the council fathers, theological experts (periti), and ecumenical observers from all over the world, but it also showcased historians, artists, filmmakers, and legal thinkers. It was visibly different from Vatican Radio, which only interviewed the bishops.

Television became part of the history of Vatican II right from the beginning, broadcasting the procession of the world episcopate and council fathers during the opening ceremony of October 1962 and John XXIII’s “moonlight speech” of that same night.

The communication of the conciliar events by the media, especially through television and film reels, became an integral part of the experience of Vatican II.

Certainly, more people have seen that extensive footage than those who have read the Council’s documents, history or commentaries.

Thanks to the mass media, the reception of Vatican II started not at the end but right at the beginning of the council.

Between the Council’s first (1962) and the second session (1963), it became clear that the Vatican’s attempt to control media access could not work.

Things inevitably became more transparent.

When seeing (on TV) was no longer believing

It was a golden age for the collaboration between the Catholic Church and the media: not just because most or many decision-makers at the RAI (which provided other broadcasting corporations with all kinds of content) were Catholic.

That was an era when television still played an educational, teacher-like role for a trusting and docile public;

• when mass media channels were few and acted like gatekeepers, with an attitude of deference to the institution and the clergy;
• when the Church was still not divided in different parties around the hot-button issues; and
• when the Vatican and the Catholic media system had a large degree of control over the Church’s narrative.

There was a different ecclesial dynamic, but also a different relationship between the media and social-political events in the early 1960s.

Then in the late 1960s, shortly after the Council ended, something broke.

The war in Vietnam became the first ever to be played out on television.

People began questioning how fairly the media was covering it and other disruptive events at the time, such as the radical politics that descended on Chicago for the 1968 National Democratic Convention, the students’ protests in European and American campuses, or the Black Power salute at the Olympic games in Mexico City.

Different from just a few years earlier at the time of Vatican II, seeing (on TV) was no longer believing; or at least it meant seeing, believing something different from or opposite to the institutional narrative.

It was the beginning of the widespread belief that the media could not be trusted, or that only that media one are already agreed with could be trusted.

One way or another, media will be a part of the synodal process

Fast forward to the Synod assembly of October 2023.

No one expects something like the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago in terms of public demonstrations and violence (as a memento for the next conclave: that year ended with the election of Richard Nixon to the US presidency).

But the changes in the relationship between the media, institutions, and public trust is a lesson that the Catholic Church is learning the hard way because of the abuse crisis.

This is the age of social media and digital media, where the Internet allows anyone to broadcast his or her opinion to the entire world in real-time, and the more divisive, the better for a certain militant mentality.

The dynamics of identity-driven media narratives are essentially contrary to the idea of a shared ecclesial experience.

One way or another, the media will be part of the synodal process.

This is because the Catholic Church lives of tradition but also of history and memory.

How many participants will keep a diary of their Synod experience or write letters that future scholars of Catholicism will be able to study in the future?

A Synod assembly that independent media cannot cover or have access to its participants will not reach many Catholics to say anything of the rest of the world.

Moreover, as French historian Pierre Nora said almost fifty years ago, reflecting on the turbulent events of 1968, “Press, radio, images do not act only as means from which events are relatively independent, but as the very condition of their existence.”In other words, having a synodal discernment exercise draped in secrecy is as good as not having it all – or worse.

A question of credibility

The Synod is in a bind.

On the one hand, there is the necessity to avoid media coverage that magnifies existing polarization, where there seem to be only two sides or two parties (and only two) for every issue.

There is also the risk for the Church of what Nora called the “monster event”, where the media system tends to make everything sensational or permanently manufacture novelties and feed the hunger for events.

On the other hand, the Church also needs the media to convey the synodal energy and momentum and to create a minimum of commonly accepted information about what is happening inside the Synod assembly.

In order to be credible, this cannot come only from Vatican-controlled media.

The role of the media at Vatican II was crucial because it helped Catholics and non-Catholics discover – and in many cases, see for the first time – the catholicity of Catholicism.

The colourful procession at the opening ceremony on October 11, 1962 – with all the bishops coming to Rome from the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Catholic Churches in the Americas, Africa, and Asia – visually represented the end of centuries of Romanization, Latinization, and Eurocentrism.

Synodality is also about a reformulation of the catholicity of Catholicism in a global Church.

The Synod assembly of 2023-2024 is a test of how to do this while dealing with a 21st-century media system.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

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