Msgr Cuthbert Alexander

The issue is not whether there is a connection between viewing violent movies and deviant behaviour. Most researchers today agree that there is.

The major concern for Fr Paul Soukup is with the hidden messages that often accompany such violence and what to do about it.

Fr Soukup, professor of Communication and Theology at Santa Clara University, California, asked a group of American priests in 2003 to consider all that America has been involved in since the attacks of September 11.

Then, “What do you suppose would have happened since 9/11 if we had a different model to inform our imagination?”

His point: A desire for vengeance has led the US into a mire of conflict. “We were attacked and the only thing we could think of was vengeance. We find ourselves at war in several places doing terribly destructive things because we lacked the imagination to say ‘maybe there is another solution’.”

The Church—called to proclaim and witness to the Gospel in every age—“has to change the moral and religious imagination,” says Fr Soukup.

I was speaking with the Jesuit priest on the day when Trinidad and Tobago drew with Sweden in its first Group B match and came away with all the honours. We were attending the Seventh Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (MEA) in Boston.

The World Cup provided an unplanned backdrop for the convention. The game was over by the time we sat down to talk and so he congratulated me on the Warriors’ showing.

To follow Fr Soukup’s drift: “What if the image of our team striving with dedication and guts—against the odds—was the one that prevailed in the memory of people hearing about Trinidad and Tobago for the first or second time?” “What would happen if the ‘warrior spirit’really took hold of the national imagination?”

The Church cannot speak to anybody’s imagination if it is not present. “It must absolutely be involved in all forms of new media,” says Fr Soukup, “The Church must have a presence there. If we don’t have any presence, we will never have any possibility. People must come to recognise this as our media as well.”

This presence has to mean service. “Let us find out what the people need. Is it information or guidance? Maybe they want to have a voice—perhaps a place where they can type their own comments and questions. How many issues are there among the people that you and I would have no interest in, but are of burning importance to them?”

Paul Soukup was ordained in 1979 and has been studying the connection between communication and theology since 1982. He always understood his vocation in terms of communication.

While he was attending a Jesuit-run high school he began discerning in a serious manner the call he felt to the priesthood. It was hardly surprising that he would think of becoming a Jesuit priest but then the real issue became what he would do as a Jesuit priest.

Teaching is more often than not what Jesuits do, but what should he do? When he considered his various activities and interests, which included work with the school newspaper and being part of a debating team he realised that the common thread was “communication”. With the goodwill and active support of his superiors for his field of interest, he entered seminary and then pursued studies in communication.

During his seminary career Soukup wrote and subsequently met fellow-Jesuit and media theorist Fr Walter Ong who recommended a number of texts for him to examine.

Through that encounter he came to see clearly that communication is the context for all our lives. This was the concept that ignited his imagination. Here was the field of study he wanted to pursue. This was the key to his vocation.

The interaction between communication and life is what today is called “media ecology”. It draws together persons from various disciplines, including education, history, literature and the communication media itself for critical research into the interplay between communication, life and the environment.

It builds on the work of the media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Fr Water Ong and others which sees the form of communication as important as whatever the content is and if it had to privilege one over the other would choose form over content.  

Fr Soukup has written or edited a number of books including Mass Media and the Moral Imagination, Media, Culture and Catholicism and Out of Eden: 7 Ways God Restores Communication with God and Others.

He has contributed numerous articles to media and communication publications. He edits the quarterly, “Communication Research Trends” published by the Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture, a service of the California Province of Jesuits and also the MEA publication, “In Media Res”.

How have the newer forms of media, television and the Internet influenced the Church and its authority? In the heated-up, fast-paced environment created by the communications media what has become of the Catholic Church?

To answer that question Fr Soukup proceeds by way of a quick broad sweep of Church history that emphasises the essential connection between communication and authority. It is important to see, first of all, he says, that “the sense of authority and identity of the Church itself has changed over the centuries.”

In the time of the first apostles, authority would have been experienced in face-to-face encounters, extending even to the era of the Fathers of the Church, when authority was rooted in the person and preaching of Augustine and others.

But most people experienced the authority of the Church in the local community in the person of the bishop or pastors in their ability to persuade and encourage others.

Later, in the medieval period when Church and civil authority became commingled, the Church’s authority and how that authority was understood began to change. The Church took over the communication function in society.

Fr Paul Soukup, SJ

People in the village and town literally received all their news from the Church. The Church became not only the place where the people would gather but where they would here the edicts of the government.

With the schools and all the institutions connected to the Church, it became the one conduit of information.

That highly-centralised structure came to be the model and understanding of the Church’s authority. As mass media developed it supplanted the Church as that conduit of information. Fr Soukup believes it is important for the Church today to recognise that it is one voice among many.

We both agree that John Paul II changed, in his own person, how the media related to Church. “John Paul II became a media figure and people would have to report on what he did,” says Fr Soukup, “but we hear very little about Benedict XVI unless he goes to Auschwitz or makes some other trip that seems newsworthy.”

I say, “Yet Benedict keeps surprising the media. He seems never to quite fit their expectations. Is it, perhaps, that Benedict understands the media better than many people believe?”

“Certainly, he may well. He is a very, very intelligent man. He is certainly the best theologian we have had as pope in centuries. John Paul had set up all kind of expectations and Benedict is not necessarily meeting those but that may be a shrewd move on his part to say, ‘you need to know that there is more to the Petrine ministry than how John Paul II lived this.’

“When we think of the Church in terms of this new media world,” Fr Soukup continues, “we need to both understand authority differently and Church leaders need to understand that they can take advantage of this new media to have an authoritative voice but they cannot simply presume it is their right. They need to develop, a religious rhetoric, a religious voice.”

He explains what this means by telling of an American bishop who accepted the invitation of a local television station to begin programming each day with an opening prayer or moral word. In time, he says, people began to associate him with a moral voice.

“Here was someone whom they perceived was interested in how they fed their families and showed them how to be thankful for the gifts they received. They realised there was more to him than the two or three issues they say we are always talking about.”

What of the future? I ask Fr Sokup how he would like to see the relationship between new media and Church develop. He returns to that matter of presence. “We need to be present, even if we see a very small outcome. If we are not present there, we can’t get this back.”

Our imagination cannot be limited to doing things in the old ways, wanting to see this or that person on the news, in the way that John Paul II was in the news. “That’s simply not going to happen. Although,” he hastens to add, “John Paul understood that you had to be present and to be present you have to be visible.

"More and more research is showing that people are using their cell phones, video clips, podcasts and so on. We have no idea how all this will develop but we need to find those in the Church who can do these kinds of things and to have that as a possibility.”

Fr Soukup is convinced that in the present milieu the Church has to use more indirect than direct means to get its message out. “The Church has had this attitude that we have to control what we do. Well, I think we can probably make a much bigger impact indirectly.”

He explains that often television shows, which may not be at all religious, wrestle with deeply religious issues. He thinks of Joan of Arcadia and Law and Order as providing examples of this in recent times.

So he says: “Can we encourage writers to create dramatic moments because more and more our moral and religious consciousness is shaped by the kinds of narratives and programmes that we watch? It is not necessarily the particular content of any show but this whole set of attitudes. We have to tell stories. I don’t think doctrine is as important as the stories.”