I’ve been searching and waiting all week for a full text of Archbishop Amato’s remarks at last week’s conference on the Church and Media at Rome’s Opus Dei University of the Holy Cross. "Strategic Management of Church Communications: New Challenges; New Directions" was the conference name, and the program is here.

If you read the news (which most blog readers do, obsessively…), you’ll recall that this talk was summarized in the secular press as ‘VATICAN CALLS FOR DA VINCI CODE BOYCOTT"

But of course. The fruit of this became clear to me yesterday when, in an interview with a (European) print reporter, I was asked "The Vatican has urged a boycott. What is the Church afraid of?"

Oh, brother. (Lesson #1 why boycotts of cultural products – especially "official" ones – are counterproductive)

I’ve still not found or been sent a full text, so I’m going to try to piece together what the Archbishop said and put it in context. So in the next few weeks, if you’re asked about "the Vatican boycott" (as I was several times last weekend in Michigan – news travels fast) – you can refer them to this post.

The context was a conference, as I said, held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, an Opus Dei university, right near Piazza Navona, (here’s a nice aerial shot) which has programs in Theology, Philosophy, Canon Law, and, interestingly enough, Communication. Fr. John Wauck, who runs a blog on Opus Dei and the DVC, and whom we met in Rome, is on the faculty.

Archbishop Amato is Secretary of the CDF. The intrepid Roaming Roman was at the talk, called "The Magisterium and the Mass Media," and took copious notes, which is really our fullest report up to this point.

Archbishop Amato’s words have already have gotten out onto the worldwide press, but I have been very amused at the content of the press reports I’ve seen so far!! Why? Well, because they pretty much exemplify exactly the issues that the good Archbishop was warning against – in particular, the tendency of secular media to focus in on one point that is of biased interest to them, and make that the "full report". In his case, it was his words about boycotting the DVC movie.

It’s very interesting and nuanced. From Roaming’s notes, it appears that what the Archbishop was addressing was how Church teaching, especially as expressed in new church documents (encyclicals, the Catechism and the various Compendiums) can be most effectively disseminated, and the obstacles to that task.

The two primary obstacles are, according to him, the cultural context in which many, even self-identified Catholics, aren’t properly disponsed to receive these documents, being either uncatechized to their nature, hostile, or both, and then the power and technique of the secular mass media, which involves essentially grabbing one or two suppposedly controversial points and manufacturing headlines out of it.

To put it bluntly, he seemed to be saying "How can we do an end run around the MSM?" How can we help Catholics (first, but then the rest of the world too, of course) are receiving Church teaching from the Church, unfiltered by the agendas of the secular media?

From the Zenit article on the talk:

The secretary of the Vatican congregation said that to better understand the Church’s difficulties of communication, what must also be taken into account is "the extreme cultural poverty of the majority of Christian faithful."

In this way the "strange success" is explained "of a pertinacious anti-Christian novel, such as ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ full of calumnies, offenses and historical and theological errors about Jesus, the Gospels and the Church."

"Christians should be more sensible in rejecting lies and gratuitous defamation," he said, and the Catholic media have the creative task to help in formation.

Mentioning the example of the recent publication of the "Gospel of Judas," the archbishop explained that "the Catholic press cannot limit itself to giving the news." Rather, "with the competence of experts of Christian antiquity, [it] must offer readers elements to understand that it is a question of an apocryphal gospel, known by the Fathers of the Church, but which was not accepted by the early Church."

"The reception of ecclesial documents, instead of being an unbearable and boring burden, can become an amazing and extraordinary permanent formation for pastors and faithful," Archbishop Amato said.

However, for this to take place, he said, "professionals are required, especially lay people, who know the two languages: of communication and of theology."

The CWN report quotes the Cardinal as saying, "I hope you all will boycott it."

What was he supposed to say? He didn’t care? Go see it?

Note, again, the twisting and turning here, as Roaming Roman notes – it’s a textbook case of what the Archbishop was warning against. He’s speaking to a small group of Catholics and says he hopes they will not support this film. It’s in the context of a talk about how the Church struggles to present its teachings in the modern media environment and what some of the challenges are, one of those challenges being the media’s fascination and trumpeting of cultural products like DVC, and their often less-than-critical and less-than-complete understanding of these products (as in uh…no, the DVC scenario is not a "threat" to Catholicism or Christianity, ’cause it’s just not true.) Somehow this gets translated into the VATICAN calls for a BOYCOTT.

Not quite.

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