PopeWatch: An Event Not a Performance

Sandro Magister has an article on why a televised Mass is never a substitute for attending Mass:

The discussion had been germinating for some time. But the April 17 homily in which Pope Francis “retracted” his concession for the television broadcast of his morning Masses at Santa Marta has brought it into the light of day.

In that homily, the pope said that “this is not the Church” if it decays from the real to the virtual. It is a “gnostic” Church with no more people or sacraments.

There is something contradictory in this “j’accuse” of Francis delivered precisely during one of his televised Masses. It is known that at the beginning of the pontificate he refused both the live broadcast of his morning Masses and the public posting of their complete video and audio recordings. But since the March ban in Italy and the Vatican on Masses with the faithful present, because of the coronavirus pandemic, he has allowed them to be televised. And it is expected that when the ban ends in May he will continue to have his Masses broadcast on TV, once again with the presence of the people.

But the question is now open. In an increasingly digital society, what would happen if even the Mass, “culmen et fons” of the Church’s life, were to be caught up in the online cloud? If from event it were to decay into spectacle? From reality to theater?

It is a question that the Fathers of the Church faced in their own way, as Leonardo Lugaresi, a scholar of the first Christian centuries, shows in the letter below.

But it is a question that today is more crucial than ever.

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THE MASS IS AN EVENT, NOT A PERFORMANCE

by Leonardo Lugaresi

Dear Magister,

You have opened, on a problem of such vital importance for the Catholic Church as that of the “tele-Masses,” a discussion of great interest to which I would like to try to make a small contribution, from the point of view of one who has long studied the judgment of the ancient Church in regard to the world of entertainment.

In the conception of the Fathers, theatrical or competitive performances are characterized by the paradoxical presence of a “fullness” of emotional power and a “void” of real substance.

Spectacles, in fact, on the one hand have the power to excite the spectators and sometimes to move them even to a state of exaltation (one might think of certain excesses among sports fans or the intense emotion that can seize the audience in the presence of a particularly strong theatrical performance) but on the other they are by their nature “fake,” in the sense that they have no real substance or, if one prefers, they belong to an order of reality completely different from that of the ordinary life of men, as shown – and this is a crucial argument of the Church Fathers – by the impossibility of a true relationship between the spectator and the actor.

In this regard Augustine – in a famous passage from book III of the “Confessions” – makes a very acute reflection, when he observes that “at the theater man wants to suffer in contemplating mournful and tragic incidents that he would not however want to endure himself.”

Wanting to endure, as a spectator, a “sorrow” from which pleasure is obtained seems in fact to Augustine a “mirabilis insania,” an astonishing folly, because in real life in the face of man’s misery the only adequate answer is mercy, not the pleasure of indulgence; and the expression of mercy is “subvenire,” assistance, not “spectare,” contemplation.

“But what is,” Augustine asks, “the mercy [that one feels] in regard to the fictions of the theater? The spectator is not urged to assist, but only invited to commiserate, and all the more does one appreciate the actor of those scenes the more one suffers. And if human misfortunes either removed in time or imaginary are performed in such a way that the spectator does not suffer, he goes away annoyed and protesting; but if he suffers he remains [in attendance] attentive and weeps for joy” (“Confessions” III 2,2).

Going to the rescue of the actor who “suffers” on the stage would obviously be absurd. The only thing we can do – indeed, that we are institutionally called upon to do, as spectators – is to “enjoy” the emotion that this suffering elicits in us. But this is exactly what we do every day by watching the world on television. In this way Augustine thus provides us with a good criterion for distinguishing the logic of the entertainment performance from that of real life. And it is the criterion of responsible relationship.

What does all this have to do with televised Masses? Much, in my opinion, if we set our minds first of all to that which the Mass is in its essence: an event and not a performance.

• Go here to read the rest.  Christ said Do This in me memory of Me., not Witness this in memory of Me.