the effects of technological progress (printed text and global travel) in the realm of communications on social relationships and personal morality. By mentioning this eighteenth-century document, I mean to promote a broader notion of media than one usually finds in both informal and formal discourses on the subject. It is a perspective that I believe is not only faithful to the church’s approach to media for the last century or so but also more helpful than somewhat popular but narrow approaches for understanding our current media environment.
Each of the texts reviewed in this chapter has its own historical context and any number of other important contextual factors (debates over true authorship, ecclesial politics, implicit audiences, etc.) that are beyond the scope of the current project. While I present these texts chronologically, it is by no means a sufficiently rich account of their historical contexts.3 Instead, the aim of this chapter is to discern the major themes in this body of church teaching, so as to elucidate, in a general way, the approach the church has taken toward issues of media and communications.
Taken as a whole, these ecclesial perspectives have variously focused on the church and the Incarnation as the theological loci for the question of media. To be sure, the former has been the most pronounced in these texts, while the latter has been more implicit and only emphasized in the latter part of the twentieth century. At its heart, this body of church teaching is about communion. Magisterial interest in communications revolves around a desire for true human community by virtue of shared imago Dei and salvation in the incarnate Word. Before the Second Vatican Council, the church focuses on communion within the context of the church alone, while after the council this communion extends outward to include the “whole human family.” Even the renewed focus on evangelization in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI can be understood in the context of this outward-looking desire for communion.
For the church, social communications, media, and their necessary technologies are always to be understood in terms of communion. Various means of communications are measured against the standard of the communion found in the sacramental life of the church. They are also judged for the degree to which they contribute to this communion. There are many characteristics of this communion, including virtue (Pius XI); art that is “subjected to the sweet yoke of the law of Christ” (Pius XII); building the common good (Second Vatican Council); self-communication in love (Pontifical Council for Social Communications); human freedom (John Paul II); upholding marriage and family (Benedict XVI); and engendering an encounter with Christ (Francis). As they draw on the Incarnation and the church to understand human communication, church leaders have had as their standard and their end “relationships among human beings with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.”4 To consider communications technology is to enter into much larger conversations about culture, politics, and economics. Therefore, although the most relevant texts come at the end of the twentieth century, this review thus includes sources that span the century as well as precede it.
Pre-Conciliar Ecclesial Perspectives
Ecclesial sources from the early twentieth century written on communications and technology focus primarily on the cinema and radio. Since its inception, film has garnered the attention of various religious authorities, including the Catholic Church. During the 1930s and 1940s, the church exercised its influence in this area through the Catholic Legion of Decency. As Anthony Burke Smith notes, “The Legion represents perhaps the most successful endeavor undertaken by the church to influence American culture.”5 It was a massive effort not only for censoring objectionable film but also for creating a culture of “decency” with regard to film within communities through the use of the Pledge in parishes.
The impetus for the Legion of Decency in the United States came from a more universal effort within the church to combat the moral evils of film, radio, and even books. In 1936, Pope Pius XI promulgated the encyclical Vigilanti Cura. The primary focus of Vigilanti Cura is the moral hazard of films. Objectionable films “are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family.”6 The Incarnation (any mention of Jesus, really) is noticeably absent from the text. The church, however, looms large. Bolstered by the success of the Legion of Decency in the United States, and owing to a historical context of the Catholic subculture (at least in the American Catholic Church), Pope Pius XI insisted that the church is obligated to protect people from the evils of cinema, even as he acknowledged its ability to be a “bearer of light and a positive guide to what is good.”7 As the century progressed, the church expanded its reflections on the possibilities of media without losing its concerns over the ways in which they can be employed for malicious ends.
The church comes to the fore in the section entitled “Concrete Proposals.” Pius XI began, notably, with the role of local pastors. He praised the Legion of Decency and its Pledge throughout the encyclical. Thus he proposed that “all Pastors will undertake to obtain each year from their people a pledge similar to the one already alluded to which is given by their American brothers and in which they promise to stay away from motion picture plays which are offensive to truth and to Christian morality.”8 He also suggested that each diocese employ the “Catholic press” to bolster this effort, specifically by “the prompt, regular and frequent publication of classified lists of motion picture plays.”9 Bishops should also set up an office for monitoring these lists, the administering of the Pledge, and the “existing motion picture theatres belonging to parishes.”10
At the center of each of these “concrete proposals” is confidence in the efficacy of the local community upon the cultural engagement of its members. To the twenty-first-century reader, such faith in this efficacy carries an air of nostalgia for Christendom. We rarely if ever have sustained experiences of the kind of local communities that would make such an effort feasible or even coherent. This is the standard of human communion for the church: relationships centered on Christ and in the sacramental life of the church embodied locally in parishes and extra-ecclesial social structures.11
In his 1929 encyclical, Pope Pius XI made familiar comments about the moral effects of various media in the context of education. According to Divini illius Magistri, books provided unprecedented access due to their low prices, the cinema was the realm of unmitigated and often immoral display, and radio had immense and unequaled power of communication.12 He wrote, “These most powerful means of publicity, which can be of great utility for instruction and education when directed by sound principles, are only too often used as an incentive to evil passions and greed for gain.”13 Media appeared in this encyclical for obvious reasons, as education involves necessarily the formation of young people and the use of particular media therein.
While the Incarnation is absent from the explicit argument of Vigilanti Cura, Pius XI referenced Christ generally throughout Divini illius Magistri. He named Christ as the ultimate teacher, beginning the encyclical by noting Jesus’ “tenderness and affection for children.”14 Jesus also commands the church, “Teach ye all nations,” which extends to all of the faithful and even those “outside the Fold.”15 Here he implied the image of the Good Shepherd, placing Christ at the center of the church’s educational mission, a mission that is particularly focused on steering young people away from objectionable media. Christ is also the image of virtue into which young people are to be formed: “By His example He is at the same time the universal model accessible to all, especially to the young in the period of His hidden life, a life of labor and obedience, adorned with all virtues, personal, domestic and social, before God and men.”16 Although Pius XI did not discuss the relationship of Christ as God made flesh, as God incarnate, explicitly, he did include Christ throughout the encyclical as his theological grounding for the church’s educational mission.
As in Vigilanti Cura, the efficacy of the church looms large in Divini illius Magistri. Somewhat more familiar to contemporary readers, Catholic education is presented as
