A Transcription of the talk given by Msgr. Paul Tighe at NISCORT on the 1st of October, 2011
You probably have seen documents and heard people talking of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. But sometimes it is hard to know what it is and what we are supposed to do. I always begin with saying what we are not. We are not the Vatican's Press Office. As you know there is a Vatican Press Office headed by Fr. Lombardi, which does the main deal with the media, the answering of questions, the preparation of information, and the back and forth in preparations like the Pope's visit to Germany, working with the media, so media relations, public relations… handled by the press office… not by us. We are not either a media organization. In the Vatican there is the Newspaper, theres a radio, television station and increasingly an internet presence. But we are not responsible for the operations of that.
What our council is supposed to do, above all else, is to promote the importance of communications at the abstract and theoretical level, but that is important. To promote the importance of communications for the life of the Church. How we do that?… in a number of ways. The first thing I often think is very often, within the church, communications does not seem as important as canon law or as theology or as other work… pastoral ministry. But may be that is because, communication is so important, we don't think about it. Somebody would say, "If you asked a fish to describe its environment, the last thing it will ever mention is water." You ask the church to describe its environment, and we forget to talk about communication, because it is so central to everything we do. We exist as a church to communicate. To make known the message of Christ. That is the fundamental reason, why the Church exists. The Church exists as a community. And as a community it cannot function unless there is good communication. Its this communication that builds us, as we know, a family. Its communication that builds a community, it builds the Church.
So communication as far as we are concerned is absolutely essential for the life of the Church. And what we try to do is to promote that by emphasizing that every chance we get. We are reminding bishops, that among their responsibilities, as people who are responsible for the pastoral care of the community is to think about communication: How do you communicate with the world out there; How do we make known who we are and the message we want to proclaim and how do we communicate among ourselves to ensure as a community, we are living up to that message.
In the last number of years, we have decided what we have… as I said to you… we are not there merely…. Our work in the Vatican is important. But we don't run the press office, we don't run these different media.
Recently we have one new project. You might have heard of news.va. What it is is, we have decided, if you want news from the Vatican, if you are a journalist or if you are a person interested in knowing what's happening in the Vatican… the website… the official website of the Vatican is good but it is very hard to find things. Its not easy. The newspaper has its own website. The radio has a website. But it is difficult to find material. So we put together a new web portal called www.news.va. Its in English, Italian and Spanish. What we try to do is, we take… news.va is not making any new news. Its an aggregator. Its taking together all the most important news from the radio, most important news from the newspaper, press office, fides, the missionary agency, and we try to integrate that so that somebody who wants to know whats happening in Rome, in the Vatican, can go click on one button, click on one site and find the material. We've also tried to create something that is multimedia. There is video material. There is audio material. And we are trying to make it attractive; with pictures and easy…. and easy to find… And I think that we have done.
So far our mistake may have been to launch it. We launched it in July, at the end of June. But July and August there is no news in the Vatican, because everybody goes on holidays. So we had this beautiful site. But we were trying to find news to put on it. We had the World Youth Day, thankfully, now the German visit. So we are really building it again with news content.
And we also want to… we will come back to this…. because we want to ensure that the new portal reflects New Media. And by that anything that is on that website, is instantly, you can share it, because it is linked into Facebook automatically. You can also tweet it. And to launch the website, we got the Pope to send his first ever tweet. I am not sure how much understood what he was doing… We had this iPod, iPad and he clicked and he sent the first tweet. And I want to come back to that in a moment…. quite symbolically that was important.
In the council, we are twenty people in Rome in our council. We also have lots of jobs we have to do. They take some of our staff opt that they are busy. We do the accreditation of audio-visual media. We also run the Vatican's film archive. And we also have people who run the network of communications in Latin America. So when you break that down, the number of us to follow communications in the world… its about six or seven people.
But what we realized is, if I want to say, how does the Church communicate, and again lets remember, Church communicates not just through media, not just through newspapers and televisions and radio, but we communicate much more effectively by the way we live our lives. By what people in the community see of us. How we serve. How we live. But we also need a type of formal presentation, a media presence and that is our…. I always say that communications is more than media and more than technology. We are specializing in media technology… We don't have much in Rome. But globally, what I have discovered in the last three years of traveling, is that the Church has an extraordinary network of communications media.
We had a congress for Newspapers, Catholic Print Media, about a year and a half ago. And it ranges from a French Publishing House, that employs over 2000 people globally. That is Catholic Media Enterprise. And it goes from there to two people I remember in particular. One, a religious sister in Pakistan, who is trying to produce a small little newsletter at great risk and danger to herself. And then she also said, If I got to communicate with the Word, I have to teach literacy because our Catholic community is not very educated in certain parts of Pakistan. I also think of people in Cuba, where there is a strong and relatively oppressive government. Oppressive of Catholics…. Its changing now, thankfully, but traditionally quite strong in controlling. There Catholics work in media again, with very limited resources and difficult environment in which they work. We have radio stations across the world. We have TV stations. We have huge presence now in the Internet. We have so many people trying new things and try to understand new communications.
We also have a very important thing that we tend to forget about. Our Universities and Institutions, such as this, that are training people in communications, because it is very clear to us, the technologies keep changing. I hope we need to have people to change with them. If you teach people to do just one thing, when the technology changes, then they are redundant. We need to form people who can understand the technology, use it well, but then also be adaptable.
The biggest challenge that we are working on, globally, is everybody in Catholic communications, everybody in communications, not just Catholic communications, is trying to understand what the digital transformation or the digital revolution means for media. Any newspaper you open talks about the crisis of media. Will Newspaper survive? not just Catholic, but will newspaper survive? Will Television survive? (as we know it). I don't know about you, I grew up in Ireland, we had one TV channel. So when I went to school in the morning, we all talked about what we saw on television the night before. Nowadays, young people can watch television from variety of sources, when they want to, and in different…. So the notion of TV is changing. Cinema Changing. So everybody is confronting this change in the digital media. Catholic media also has to see it.
What we are trying to do is, is to try and to working with Catholic media throughout the world. We are trying to say, in simple terms may be, You know the Gospel wherein Jesus said, you put new wine into new skins, you don't put old wine into new skins. We are at that kind of change. Many of us want to what we all could take and put it out on the internet as well. What we have to realize is "NO." The Internet is changing everything.
Recently I was asked to give a talk about "the Internet in the Seminary", okay..? But I changed the topic… We have to talk about "The Seminary in the age of the Internet." Because the Internet is not just a little machine in the corner of every student's room, Its something that is changing how they learn, how they communicate, their ability to form relationships, their way of thinking. Does that make sense to you? So we are trying to say all the time is, the biggest thing… the message we are trying to promote… is to say that changes with digital media are a change in mentality, in culture, rather than simply a change in technology.
And the biggest change, I think for me, is as a Church, our model of communication is born, I think, from preaching. So I stand up in the Church, and I speak, and everybody listens, or pretends to listen at least. Then when the microphone came along, that allowed me to reach more and more people. When the radio is invented, it is the microphone that allowed me to reach all over the world. When television came along, then they could see me as well as listen to me.
But the model of communication was always, I am here talking, you are listening passively and quietly. That is completely changed today. New media is participative. I say something… and if I am looking… I was teaching until four years ago. And when I was teaching, my students had their hands under the desk, because they were busy texting. If I am looking, they might be listening to me… If I was really looking, in the sense that I was telling something really interesting, they might as well tell somebody about it. And that is how new media works. We can…. at some ways it is easier.
In the past, if I want to get Pope's message out to the world, I had to convince TV stations, radios and newspapers to talk about it. And there they might edit it in ways I didn't like it. Now I can create my own site, I can put it there. The difficulty is, nowadays, there are millions of sites like that. And if I want it to be looked at, I have to get people to come to use it, to begin sharing material. I also have to be willing, if they have a question to respond to that, which is not always very easy.
So the two things that bring big changes is New Media is ACTIVE. The gap between the communicator and the audience is changed. The other thing is its INTERACTIVE. But may be what we have to realize is, good communications, even before technologies were invented, were not just about speaking but about listening. The more I listen, the better I can speak. Because I know what the people are trying to think, what they are trying to reflect.
So the technology is may be bringing us back to something good, which is the importance of listening, the ability to respond to not what I think your questions are but what your questions are. And this is the biggest change and the biggest change for us as Church in our language. I don't mean just language - what language we speak - but the how we speak. New Media… somebody is online… they look something… they click on it… and they are gone in two seconds… quicker. So if we are trying to say something, we have to attract the attention very quickly. They want to listen and they want to see, and then they want to be able to share it. They will also edit it. So if I want to say something, that would not be watered down and destroyed, I have to say it very quickly in a formula that I think people will carry.
So what we say is that, we need a new language of communications. if you go to many church websites, you have sermons, speeches and the talks from the people responsible. But very few people are going to go on and read those unless they are already very interested. What we need is the language that engages the people in the beginning.
For our Council at the moment, what we are trying to put in is, lets keep reflecting on how media is changing and that means, if you are running a newspaper in Kerala, or if you are trying to start a radio station in Assam, you now have to think differently. Because increasingly, even in isolation there is, your product that you are producing can go on to the international - which is great. That means, I really could work in Assam can now be available in Kerala, which wasn't in the past, or globally. So we have possibilities of the New Media if we learn the language to work together.
So the real buzz word, was transformation - we have to have a new way of communication, a new language that is more interactive. The second thing is, technology allows us to work together, even though we are physically distant from each other. And we have to learn that new style of collaboration.
I want to be honest with you and say one thing that when I travel, very often we go to places… There is a radio station in Brazil. And the only reason that there is a radio station in Brazil is because a particular priest or a nun fought very hard to get it there. And if he or she were waiting for the commissions that the bishops established to make the radio station, it would never be there. So many people who work in communications are entrepreneurs, they are people of energy and direction but not always good for working with others.
Now more than ever we have to work together or we don't get the benefit of our work. So the final word is, what we talk about convergence. Convergence means, a radio station is online, a radio station has to have text, a radio station has to have pictures. So we all having to learn new skills. And that's, for you who are younger, that is a huge advantage. But for somebody, and i went to a meeting in United States this year of mainly people who run newspapers, Catholic Diocesan Newspapers. They are mainly nearer to 60 than to 50. For them to change now is extraordinarily difficult. Because they have spent their life learning how to be good journalist in making newspapers. And now people are saying, we want a picture of you, we want a video that should tell. They don't like that….
So there are huge challenges. So thats what I want to say to you. I want to hear what your ideas are. How do you thing the Church…. Are we going to get lost… So much information but we just get absolutely diluted and I imagine in India, this must be very particular… Or will we end up just talking to ourselves, or can we actually use this technology to interest people who need to hear the message of Christ and then also engage our own communities. Okay thats me finished… Thank you..!
