Saints . . . reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management.
Joseph Ratzinger
Our president has a hashtag; now our pope has one, too. Benedict acquired it just in time to bequeath it to his successor. The next pope will inherit #askpontifex together with an audience already bundled and delivered. Is that not cool?
Very cool. And the very reason it gives pause.
According to The Guardian, Twitter’s own sales department courted the Vatican diligently. Eager to boost sales in Europe, its consultants were “extremely keen to pull in yet another hugely influential microblogger, following the popularity of the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama.” Twitter wanted another celebrity account. The Vatican gave it one.
The impetus behind the Holy See’s enthusiasm for a social networking presence is Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council on Culture since 2007. A Twitter apologist, the cardinal is the engine behind Vatican City’s pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale and a front-runner among papabili at the next conclave. I want to add a bit more about the cardinal and his embrace of contemporary art. But that can hold. First, let me clarify the case for unease with this digital initiative.
Cardinal Ravasi posing with the cell phone he uses for tweeting, at his office in Rome
Without a doubt, Twitter has multifarious managerial and tactical applications. It is a logistical tool, useful for organizing, strategizing, distributing information and instructions. While it can serve barbaric purposes as readily as benevolent ones, my concern is not with the technology itself. The technological structure of the modern world is a given, one that grants us much to be grateful for. My skepticism is directed solely toward the incongruity of this particular technique as a tool of evangelism. Especially as it was inaugurated in the name of a man as deliberate and discerning as Benedict.
The popular press was not slow to grasp that there was something discordant, inapropos, in the news. Andy Davy’s cartoon in Britain’s The Sun hinges on the disconnect between street argot—a lingua franca across the Twitterverse—and modes of papal expression.
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Twitterspeak is fundamentally alien to Benedict’s style. His sophistication and attention to nuance—the subtleties of theological reflection—is nullified by the very structure of the service. One hundred forty characters constitute only a sound bite, one more ephemeral utterance that, of necessity, omits more than it conveys. There is a certain pathos in the Vatican’s utopian expectations for a dumbed down, de-incarnated form of speech that, in this instance, masquerades as a conversation. No conversation was ever intended. Set in gear prior to Benedict’s resignation, the digital chase was all one way. You could friend the pope; but he would not be friending you.
Like many busy, high-profile users of Twitter, the pope can absent himself from the process. Surrogates are on hand for the tweeting. As the Vatican concedes, papal tweets will be produced by aides entrusted with broadcasting a virtual simulacra of Benedict’s —and the next pope’s—pastoral voice. (Social media become more a-social the higher you go up the scale of prominence.)
So far, a least one million dotcomrades have added @pontifex to their repertory. Perhaps it warms you to think that the pope really does have divisions after all. Still, they are many degrees of separation from the real thing. It is discomforting to ponder the credulity of a public susceptible to the fantasy that, somehow, it is in communication with the Holy Father.
This is one particular exercise in virtuality that risks further malformation of what it means to be social, let alone Christian. It runs substantial risk of reducing faith to truncated verbal gestures and substituting the vapidity of one hundred forty characters for living witness. Our faith is lived and expressed person to person. In Hopkins’ luminous phrasing: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his. /To the Father, through the features of men’s faces.”
It remains to be seen if the Vatican’s use of Twitter can foster a fully human faith in a culture increasingly dependent on contrivance and illusion—which Benedict warned against just weeks before adopting Twitter. We pray that it can. If it cannot, it will bring the Church into greater conformity with the lust for banality that drives popular culture.
February 15th, 2013 | 11:36 am
Your argument have merit with regard to Twitter by itself – 160 characters does limit what one can say. But I think you overlook the possibility of using Twitter in combination with other resources that social media provide; I would not have known about this article if First Things hadn’t included a HTML link with it’s tweet. Capable hands wield limited power in the most amazing of ways.
February 15th, 2013 | 12:06 pm
Yes, Dennis Mahon, I agree with you about the use of Twitter “in combination with.”
What I hoped to convey—and perhaps did not—was dismay over what seems one more episode
in the decline of religious discourse. This time, at the very level that, as Christians,
concerns us most. Did I not write that Twitter was a useful logistical tool, etc.?
I am simply uneasy with efforts to promote the papacy as an office on the cutting edge
of cool.
February 15th, 2013 | 1:29 pm
I am more… comforted… by a papacy not afraid to encounter people on [some of] their own terms, eating with the prostitues and tax collectors so to speak. And yes, that is cool. I would also hope that no pope ever start tweeting things like “imma bout to say Mass for 500,000 peeps. #craycray!”
February 15th, 2013 | 1:56 pm
Thought-provoking analysis… I was also a little skeptical of the whole #askpontifex. I’m something of a computer nerd, and spend a lot of time with social media, but I agree that Twitter in particular is rather shallow, and I haven’t seen any point in using it. On the other hand, there is a certain irony in criticizing social media in a blog entry, no? :)
It’s interesting to think whether Jesus would have used social media and Twitter in particular. I don’t really think it’s a matter of the pope being too good to slum it with us common folk. It’s more a matter of subsidiarity. If you have a question about the Catholic faith, in almost all cases it would be much better for you to go and ask your parish priest, or to go to church and pray about it, or to study the Bible, etc.
It’s just not the pope’s job to answer people’s questions individually, just as it isn’t a four-star general’s job to make sure that individual privates know what they’re doing. The hierarchy of the Church is in place for a reason, so that the pope can be free to do his job, that is, care for the Universal Church as a whole, and parish priests have an opportunity to do theirs, that is, personally care for the individuals. And of course this is borne out in the fact that the pope doesn’t read or write any of the tweets himself anyway, so — what exactly is the point?
February 15th, 2013 | 4:11 pm
Ah, Patrick! Irony notwithstanding, this is still a conversation, is it not?
There is room for back and forth between us. That makes it a conversation,
not an impersonal monologue.
February 15th, 2013 | 4:19 pm
C.R. Nugent’s comment illustrates my unease with papal tweets. The Holy Father
encounters nobody. Neither do the Twitter recipients encounter him. Did Jesus
eat with a tax collector and the ritually unclean? Yes. And he spoke to each
of them face to face. It was a mutual, personal encounter. One point I had
tried to make is that impersonally generated tweets sustain the illusion of
being personal when, in reality, they are not. It is not the business of our
shepherds to encourage illusions. We practice the gospel–try to–face to face.
February 15th, 2013 | 5:53 pm
You do know that Twitter has a direct message feature, right? Someone could #askpontifex and get a direct personal answer. Vice versa. Modo dicebam.
February 15th, 2013 | 6:08 pm
According to press reports, a team of Twitter consultants designed a
system to protect the sender from the burden of responding. Tweets go
out from a staff of aides. Period. Ain’t no inbox that I’ve read about
for @pontifex.
February 15th, 2013 | 7:42 pm
I think your arguments might prove too much. Surely we encounter the person of the author in reading a book, even though there is no conversation.
Or what about the people standing in the crowd listening to the words of Jesus. He couldn’t interact personally with each one of them, but certainly his listeners were encountering the person of Jesus through his words.
And I don’t think it’s possible to measure the power of words by counting the number of characters. Even Tweets can mediate the person, affect our faith, and be used by the Holy Spirit.
I think Twitter must be judged my more than just the content that is tweeted. Strictly speaking, the pure content of the papal tweets could be found elsewhere in more developed form. But I think the value of a pope tweeting is more than that. It’s more like a personal gesture, like a smile that a person needed right at that moment.
A tweet from a pope can be a word of encouragement, a gesture of solidarity, a sign of wanting to walk among us common folk ‘virtually’ when it’s impossible physically.
So if it’s true that the pope is not personally involved in the papal Twitter account, that is very unfortunate because to me it’s that personal touch that is most of the value of the whole project.
‘New media’ is not necessarily shallow, incapable of revealing the person. I know because the person of my wife was first mediated to me by it.
February 15th, 2013 | 8:03 pm
It is not Twitter itself under the gun here. Kindly read more carefully, Brian.
Your final comment speaks to my point: the person of your wife was mediated to
you precisely because a conversation was involved. That is not what the papal
Twitter account permits. Please attend to what was written. (Is anyone narcissistic
or delusional enough to believe that a pope—charged with the global governance of
the Church and faced with a serious scandal involving the Vatican Bank—sits in
the papal apartments reading and answering tweets from Jane and John Doe? It would
be close to irresponsible if he did.)
My objection to the Vatican Twitter account is that it seems a piece of theatre, one in
which——as emails like this indicate——the audience is encouraged to sentimentalize the players.
February 16th, 2013 | 9:27 am
Let me correct myself. I really should not be flip.
In saying there is “no inbox” I was taking a short cut to the point that the pope’s presence on Twitter is not intended for personal exchanges. He will not be sitting at his desk checking your tweets. Aides will do the tweeting in his name. (He can, of course, do it himself when inclined. But the demands of global governance preclude any bets on the inclination.) You will not be talking to the pope; he will not be talking to you. Anonymous staffers will mediate.
Press accounts emphasized that the Vatican was given “careful consultancy” by Twitter itself to insure protection, as far as possible, from the free-wheeling tumult of the service.
My unease with the project lies in the fact that @pontifex technicizes the pope’s pastoral role—renders it efficient but all the more impersonal and illusory, thereby diminishing it at the same time.
In short—if not technically accurate—there ain’t no inbox.
February 16th, 2013 | 11:06 am
(Id like to point out the dialog we’ve shared tTop of the Markhat started for me with an impersonal tweet.)
You should look at Pope Benedict and his Twitter project like Pope Paul VI, the first pope to fly (and the first to leave Italy since 1809!). Leave it to future popes to utilize the media better, more personally, more effectively (like JP the Great trotting the globe!). Our current pope has made the account and laid the foundation and I applaud him (and his staff) for that.
May God bless him and you all of your days!
CRN
February 17th, 2013 | 8:42 am
Maureen,
I thought your article was excellent. It was salutary because this is a topic that needs discussion and excellent because it was well balanced and properly nuanced.
We rarely, if ever, question the benefit of using a new technology. The question “should we build this?” is tantamount in our culture to “can we build this?” So the question itself is salutary as a corrective to our technophilic age.
But I think it was more than thought provoking, it was thoughtful. Twitter has uses no doubt. But my question to Brian Killian is: Can a tweet really be compared to a gesture or a smile at the right moment? Think carefully because the appropriateness of that analogy is at the heart of the discussion.
In fact, we treat such a case less and less like an analogy and more like a dead metaphor and one whose death is quite tragic for us! We speak of “messages from the Pope” that are neither messages (because of their truncated form) nor from the Pope (because they are from his aides). They are like messages but to call them messages is at best a metaphor. Facebook is another example. It parades as personal “communication” when often it is nothing more than a bulletin board.
February 17th, 2013 | 9:01 am
P.s. sorry to double post, (this appears to be a faut-pas in internet “etiquette”…another limitation in my opinion), but I wanted to make a caveat about my earlier post. I think the Holy Spirit can work where and how he wills and so, that “gesture” Brian speaks of may be genuine in that sense. But my caution is still the same: we are too apt to take images for reality and mediated things for the things themselves. That’s all I wanted to say.
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