Accolades and tributes are pouring in after the death of Mother Angelica, the indefatigable and unique foundress of EWTN, who passed away on March 27 after years of suffering in the wake of a massive stroke in 2001. Attesting to her unrivaled influence in Catholic media and New Evangelization efforts, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, the president of the USCCB, called her an “extraordinary woman, devout believer and media pioneer.” She will be buried in a crypt above her own biological mother, who also took a religious vow as a nun later in life. The Mass will be celebrated by Philadelphia’s own Archbishop Charles Chaput.
Mother Angelica’s impact on Catholic media can hardly be overstated. She was by no means a neutral figure, engendering armies of devout followers and high-profile critics, including some bishops.
Objectively, she utterly changed the way we think about the intersection of evangelization, technology, globalization and delivery platforms. The Catholic Church, while unique in the eyes of believers in its relationship with the Holy Spirit, is in some ways subject to the limits and benefits inherent in any other sociological reality where teaching and information is handed on and received. That is to say, Marshall McLuhan’s quip still applies to it: “The medium is the message.”
The channels through which information is transmitted and comes to be understood are not entirely separable from the message they intend to convey. From reports stating that the pope’s newly launched Instagram account was gaining a thousand followers a minute in its first days to the fact that centuries of papal teaching are now available at the cost merely of a few keystrokes, ecclesiological thinking cannot but be defined in some ways by a world in which immediacy of information is prioritized to such a degree. I am, for instance, currently directing a graduate thesis on Catholic female disaffiliation rates and the role social media can play in contemporary evangelization efforts and theological discourse, through a analysis of information provided by over 220 women born 1965-80.
Villanova professor Anthony Godzieba has written some penetrating analyses of issues at play in these processes, in contexts far removed from the nonagenarian TV star and the Gen Xers’ exit. He posits that digital media and the image storm in which we live today have the potential to damage or eviscerate a “thick” reception process that has traditionally been an important part of both theological thinking and magisterial teaching. In effect, any church opinion or papal hiccup (whether intellectual or physical) can today become major news events, and absolutized in a world ravenous for its demand for “instant access.” As his article “The Magisterium in an Age of Digital Reproduction” states: “Immediacy equals authenticity equals authority.”
Our world today, with a visceral distaste for spatial and temporal distance, can be seen as shearing off the vitally important context and on-going reception process, an important part of teaching and learning in the Christian faith for millennia. What preaching and living out the faith look like in a world of 24-hour news sources covering real-time ecclesial events in sub-140-character slivers is a developing phenomenon.
Mother Angelica altered forever the way we think about these issues, for as Vatican journalist John Allen astutely points out, she proved “at the beginning, you don’t need deep pockets, sophisticated technology, or extensive delivery platforms. All you need is one charismatic personality whom people will crawl over hot coals to see or hear, and everything else will take care of itself. Mother Angelica was that lone figure, around whom an entire multimedia empire sprung up. She was, in effect, her generation’s Archbishop Fulton Sheen.”
Collingswood native Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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