LOOKING BEYOND THE SPECTACULAR

Domenico Del Rio

The present is the past of the future, are words of Saint Augustine I think. Which as a forecast say little. This can mean, in fact, that there will be a break, there will be something new, in the future compared to the past. But it can also mean that the future will be connected with the present and that therefore it will be more or less the same. Personally, as far as the mass-media are concerned, I think the second interpretation will hold. And therefore to answer the question on this near future which will be the relation between the Jubilee and the media, we have only to look at the present.

Today the media seem unable, at least, such as they are in their present form and nature, to give importance to religious or spiritual events. We could say that not even of cultural events are they able to grasp the spiritual aspects (perhaps not even the humanistic aspects). They prefer to call attention to eccentricity, curiosities, ostentation, morbidity. Even religious information of a cultural nature hardly ever makes the culture pages of newspapers (unless there are publisher's interests). Italy is considered one of the Catholic countries, at least according to the registers, but regards religion, Italian newspapers show ever less respect for Judaism, Buddhism, Protestant Christianity, but they indulge in criticism and rejection towards the Catholic Church, especially when it is a question of papal or episcopal intervention in the field of morality, and they demonstrate indifference, adulteration, not to say derision, for the things of faith.

We should not be misled by the space given to the Pope's journeys (or health). This is classified with aspects of the spectacular or gossip on which newspapers feed. In the end, the Church is reduced to the figure of the present Pope who has become a consumer personality, seen as a courageous hero when he goes to Sarajevo, then rejected or defamed if he mentions abortion, intervenes against the Gulf War or speaks against birth control at the Beijing meeting.

The latest thing seems to be a sort of game of the end of a pontificate: personalities of the Catholic Church, bishops or cardinals are in the news, with interventions or direct interviews, and their statements are viewed and presented as a plan for radical transformation or change in the papacy and the Church, thus sustaining with the words of prelates one's own concept of a future Catholicism with no requirements of faith or morals, secularised and globalised inside all the world religions.

Recently, in an enquiry carried out by one of the Italian daily newspapers, Avvenire, we saw declarations by the editors of Italian dailies who, in theory, were in agreement about the need for serious religious information, as long as they may continue in the above mentioned manner. It is therefore natural that with regard to the Jubilee, the newspapers give no information on the nature or objectives of the event. It would be interesting to find out if from the pages of the newspapers or television news the public have formed any idea, and what idea. The mass-media seem to place the Jubilee solely within a dimension of mass-tourism in Rome. Hence the fear of forecasted invasions of tourists ("pilgrims") in the Italian capital, fear expressed on the front pages even by famous personalities of culture.

We can be sure that, set within the fascination of the arrival of 2000, with the grandeur which will certainly surround the opening of the Holy Door, the start of the Jubilee will be given considerable space in the papers. Then it will be abandoned to its destiny as a spiritual event of no interest to the media. In the end, the matter will be picked up again to make a count of how many pilgrims came to Rome, how much money was made by the Vatican , by the city's hotels ...