And what is keeping Fr. Lombardi and Mons. Celli and all those experienced, intelligent heads at the Vatican from doing something about these obvious disservices to the Holy Father and to the message/mission of the Church? What did Cardinal Foley – a media-savvy man from Philadelphia – do all those 20 years as director of social communications for the Vatican under John Paul II? Does the Vatican’s so-called ‘social communications’ apparatus worry only about reaching the general media? What a joke, to rely on the general media to spread the word regularly and right!The communications effort should be focused primarily on the priests and bishops and seminaries and Catholic schools throughout the world – on the understanding, of course, that they pass it on in a timely manner to the parishioners and the public that hey serve!
Surely, there must be at least one organism in the Vatican – the secretariat of State, or the Congregation for the Clergy, or the Congregation for Bishops – that must make it one of its primary responsibilities to compile and update the e-mail addresses of each and every Catholic priest (at least the parish priests) and bishop in the world [and by extension, the e-mail of every Catholic institution of learning and national Catholic organizations] – so that mass mailings can be made to them every time there is something to be communicated to the universal Church. [Of course, there will be parishes so remote, or so poor, they may not have any e-mail capability at all. But the local bishop should attend to routinely to keeping lines of communication open with such parieshes and priests.]
As things stand, that ‘something’ is more often than not, the Pope’s words. I expatiated on this before, to the effect that if the papal texts were immediately disseminated in English and Spanish, to begin with, to every parish priest in the world, it would be understood by at least 90% of them – enough to be passed on in usable form to their parishioners through some simple diocesan and parish level mechanism.
The Osservatore Romano, even if it evolves into the best newspaper in the world, is obviously not an organ of mass dissemination. It serves as an official reference point about what matters to the church and to the Pope in terms of what must be communicated – it cannot and will never be by itself the source of communications for the great majority of the faithful, not even for the bishops and priests, even when it goes online in its entirety.
The Internet is there – it’s free, it’s instantaneous, and it is universal. The Vatican already has a sophisticated multi-site, multimedia IT system going on – it just is not being used the best way possible.
P.S. The Vatican had better light a fire under the a…. of its translators, too. There is absolutely no reason not to come out with a translation of a papal text (unless it is an encylical or a book) within 24 hours, even if it must be labelled ‘unofficial and provisional’ initially.
I think she’s absolutely right, and the “well, you know it’s a big church and historically cautious and slow-moving” excuse just doesn’t cut it. We’re not talking about development of doctrine here. We’re talking about, I think, two things:
1) Getting the Pope’s words out to the world, quickly – and that means the world, not just those who speak Italian. As Teresa points out, there are (at least) two levels to this: translation and dissemination. Further, within the translation department, there are various issues, as we have seen time and time again. There do not seem to be enough translators, first of all, and there have been times at which translations – not so much of the Pope’s words, but of official documents – have been less than faithful.
Here’s what needs to be understood: the world is moving very fast, and, barring international economic and technological collapse (not impossible, to be sure), it’s not going to slow down. There are many elements to church life that will and should remain measured and slow – most of them, probably. But communication isn’t one of those things. People expect information quickly now, for better or for worse. What this means is (you knew this was coming) a paradigm shift. The thinking needs to be “This is the way the world works now. What comes out of the Vatican needs to be faithful and accurate, but we have to find a way to make it come out more quickly. ” If that means hiring more translators and then deliberately streamlining the process of checking the accuracy and faithfulness of translations…then that’s what has to be done.
2) Equipping the Church on the local level to apply Vatican communications, disseminate them locally, and respond to questions.
I don’t know much about how the relations between the Vatican communications office and the communications offices of national bishops’ conferences work. I don’t know what the expectations are, what’s comunicated. So, for example, when the Motu Proprio was released..how were the bishops’ conferences and individual conferences prepared for this? What guidance were they given in answering questions about this from the press? Perhaps there is a mechanism in place, perhaps resources are provided, but they are not used. I have no idea. But it seems more could be done – on both ends of that.
Of course, the other, unspoken factor in this, one that Magister has alluded to himself several times, are elements within the Curia that are hostile to Benedict and his program, which at times does seem the only reason for the unbelievably slow translations and the errors in translations that we see.
Unless lunch, limoncello and grappa are more to blame.
Which is always possible. You never know…
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