Pope Leo is speaking to the world effectively and grabbing public attention. His voice is so loud that it is as if he is using a loud hailer.
His widely discussed encyclical ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ draws on his successful international peacemaking forays as lessons in effective communication.
But the pope’s success conceals the fact that communication poses major difficulties for the church.
Recognising the value of good church communication is the one thing that all of us within our broad church should have in common, wherever we stand. It applies to both top-down communication in a hierarchical church and bottom-up or sideways communication in a synodal church.
Many of us have worked with church agencies trying to reach a wider audience with an important call to justice, or witnessed official pastoral statements or media releases sinking like a stone.
The Pope’s penetration is the exception rather than the rule.
Hiring the professionals
The official church is aware of the need to improve its communication. Hence the employment of a plethora of communications professionals.
The Pope has just appointed Maria Montserrat Alvarado, President and CEO of the US giant EWTN News, to head the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. Her job will be to manage the vast stable of church media operations.
Lost in the noise
The main difficulty for top-down communication is that, in a world of information overload, attracting the attention of the Catholic public, much less the wider community, is increasingly difficult on any subject.
Church communication shares this problem with all media. The competition from new social media is overwhelming.
Traditional outlets, like diocesan newspapers, are in terminal decline.
Bishops and their agencies use orthodox communication tools with limited success. Their captive audience in parishes is shrinking.
Few parishes are effective intermediaries between bishops and their flocks. They just have other priorities, even when they have the skills and energy.
The same is true of Catholic schools and social service agencies, where there often is greater energy.
The ‘great unwashed’ majority of cultural Catholics are even more difficult to reach, as failed efforts to involve them in synodal consultations have shown.
Reaching upwards
Those Catholics who wish to make direct upward contact with Vatican agencies, such as the Synod Secretariat, are offered only tenuous formal communication opportunities.
There are traditional lines of communication to follow, but the chances of an upward email or letter receiving a response are small.
Reaching out sideways
Communication within the church is equally problematic for those, like the members of reform movements, who are trying to reach out sideways beyond individual parishes and dioceses to address the wider Catholic community.
They suffer from the atrophy of official communication channels and, where they do exist, from their control by zealous church officials committed to a single ‘party line’.
Reform movements must create their own lines of communication with the wider Catholic community through electronic newsletters and webinars.
These communications help create flourishing communities of like-minded Catholics.
- John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University in Canberra and a director of the leading reform network, Council of Australasian Catholics.