By Steve Weatherbe

CHRISTIAN churches are doing a good job using the internet to strengthen faith and evangelize, National Post  columnist Fr. Raymond de Souza said in Victoria last month – but, he cautioned, they haven’t come to grips with teaching the word in a post-print age.

De Souza, a Catholic priest who writes regularly for Catholic and conservative Christian publications as well as the Post, said that only lately are the full implications of film and television becoming apparent.

“This is a culture that discounts argument and emphasizes experiences and images,” he told a gathering at St. Andrew’s Catholic Cathedral, citing the conclusions of media experts Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. When Christian churches try to present moral teachings to society or even their own members, using traditional, logical argument, “people understand it but they aren’t persuaded by it.”

For 2,000 years, said de Souza, “we have always argued from general principles: we say, ‘X is always wrong.’ And then we say, ‘that is an example of X, so it is wrong too.’”

This approach works in a culture dominated by print or oral communication because talking or writing uses sentences which make assertions. And assertions can be proven or disproven.

But TV and film don’t present statements, he said. Instead, they offer images which arouse feelings of pleasure or discomfort.  

“You can’t refute an advertisement that shows an athletic man behind the wheel of a SUV or a smiling woman drinking a Coca Cola.”

De Souza noted a revival of experiential devotions in the Catholic church, citing eucharistic adoration, where devotees pray or meditate in front of an “exposed” consecrated communion wafer – which, in Catholicism, is the literal body of Christ.  “What’s quite unusual,” he noted, “is that many of the people who are doing this could not tell you what they believed about it,” only how it felt doing it.

Similarly, he added, Christians and non-Christians alike are sincerely defending actions and beliefs contrary to Christian teaching, on the basis of how they feel about these things. De Souza said Pope Benedict appeared to be “trying very hard not to talk about morality” in the early days of his pontificate, because he first needed to establish “the groundwork, that Jesus is love.” In other words, he had to establish himself as someone people feel good about.

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De Souza also said the secular news media had in the past 25 years become very open to religion as something worth covering for its own sake. He credited both the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Pope John Paul’s influence in bringing down the Soviet bloc.

While many in the secular media still decried religious influences in society, they could no longer ignore it or assume it was dying out, as previous generations of journalists had.

While the Catholic church often took the brunt of media attacks aimed at institutional religion, he said there was an upside to this.

“It’s very difficult for the news media to find a spokesperson for evangelical Christianity, but with the Catholic church they know who speaks for it.” Evangelicals were sometimes unfairly discounted by the news media for this reason.

On the other hand, he said, evangelical Christians were much better at using TV and radio. “The evangelical preaching style translates better onto TV,” he said, joking that a TV show on eucharistic adoration would find few viewers.

Asked about the current popularity of the notion of the “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, de Souza commented: “In no country with an Islamic majority do Christians live with complete religious liberty, or without harassment or the fear of harassment.” Wherever Christians build a church, Muslims build a mosque beside it. “They even tried to do this in Nazareth. That’s harassment.”

De Souza said $2 trillion in Saudi Arabian oil profits have gone into spreading an extremist Islamic belief system which  is intolerant of other branches of Islam, let alone of Christianity. “Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been killed,” he said, adding, “The most effective way of dealing with this would be $5-a-barrel oil, but that is not going to happen.”

He also commented on a new book by Washington pundit Christopher Hitchens, titled God is Not Great. It is the latest of a batch of atheistic books attacking religion – which De Souza believe is a reaction to religion’s failure to wither away – despite being disproved, in the critics’ view, by Darwin, Einstein and Freud. He dismissed the book as intellectually lightweight but amusing.

June 2007