THE RELIGIOUS EVENT OUTSIDE OF ENTERTAINMENT

Alceste Santini

Vatican expert of the newspaper L'Unità

The organizers, the operators of the Jubilee of 2,000, the first of the technological era, cannot help but use all the multimedia instruments to transform it into a world event so that it can be followed in real time by those who cannot come to Rome. This is the new difference, with respect to other jubilees, that John Paul II has understood, from the time he announced it, so much so to recall attention to the many various aspects that need to be covered, so that they adapt, first of all, their mentality to reality to bring forth an adequate discussion for a clear communication on the level of content and efficiency in the use of expressive means.

It is not by accident that the Pope, keeping in mind that the center of the event of the jubilee will be the figure of Christ with his teaching 2,000 years from his birth, has asked himself, with a certain worry, if there is still room for Christ in the "traditional mass media" and if its possible to "claim a place for Him in the new media." It is a worrisome and complex question that must make reflect a Church that wants to renew the Christian message in a multicultural world, mulitreligious and for a large part, brought to be indifferent to religion and its values, or to live them in a subjective way, even by those who claim to be Christians and belong to the Catholic ecclesial community. There is in fact a risk that the celebrations for the jubilee, programmed to relaunch the figure of Jesus, can be altered or distorted by the entertainment, which the mass media instruments will want to use to make the event more interesting and communicable to their audience. There is the risk, that in transmitting the event and its significant moments, that the point of view may focus on the subjectivity of the journalists, of the operators of communication to alter the essential with respect to authentic meaning.

It must not be forgotten that even the Jubilee will enter the complex and often the perverse mechanism of the audience. And not always, because of cultural reasons and lack of critical sense, are the audience and readers capable of re-elaborating that which they see or read, to find the true message, apart from the means of expression used by the operators with the intention of making it more communicable.

The extraordinary capacity of communication of the mass media instruments, to allow the participation of an event in real time for all of humanity, has no precedent and this can only be positive. The globilization of information is part of this century that is about to close and it will be even stronger in the XXI. But, especially for this reason, it is necessary to be equipped to know how to take the true message that reaches populations in the language through the mediation of the different cultures. And it becomes even more difficult when the message that is transmitted is called Jesus Christ, who is not known to a large part of humanity, and those who say they know him and practice his teachings do not know him well enough. And it must also be considered that the process of knowing and communicating implies a dynamic relationship between the communicator and the receiver with respect to the event that is transmitted and received.

This is how it is born, the not so easy task of who, in the Church, must take into account all these new and complex problems, beginning with the fact that the mass media constitute today the new areopagus in which, a large part of consciences and behavior between people are formed, communicating from adolescents, to children who are the most defenseless. The Jubilee, therefore, is a great communicative opportunity for the Church, to measure its communicative capacity in front of the challenge posed by the mass media.