Firstly, will the clergy of this group need to be re-ordained? Secondly, could a young Catholic man who wished to be a married priest now join the Traditional Anglican group and seek married ordination within it?

Time has erased much of what he said to the assembly, but the matter and manner of Tutu’s preamble remain crisply clear in my mind’s eye and ear.

Read more on America Magazine’s blog http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&id=83050565-3048-741E-5444683162908716

The moral of the story is that authors need friends who don’t read their books, but just appreciate them for their friendship. A beautiful thought, and as I look around the room today I am moved to see friends without whose friendship life would be pretty well intolerable. However just to add, that today, in the context of a book-launch, I appeal to my friends to be friends who do read one’s books!

Alexander McCall-Smith of The Number One Ladies Detective Agency fame (you know Precious Ramotswe, the ‘traditionally built lady from Botswana), was once asked by someone at the Cape book fair what she should do if she thought she had a book in her. He looked alarmed and replied that she should go immediately to the doctor and be X-rayed!

I frequently feel I have a book in me – one is sitting in my computer at the moment called Vocations and What to Do with Them, on accompanying young people who think they have a vocation to the priesthood and/or religious life, or there’s maybe a novel about an NGO in a failed state, or a collection of spiritual talks, or a series of short stories or a collection of poems.

However this book on the Church and the media was not one that I felt I had in me. Rather it came as a commission from Cluster Publications in Maritzburg. This is a danger of being on publishers’ boards: eventually they ask you to write a book. As usual people know you better than you know yourself and the prime mover here, Sr Sue Rakoczy, had noted that I am a hopeless media junkie and made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Not that the book wrote itself. I quickly realised that the Church and the Media is a massive, ever-developing and ultimately uncontrollable field. All I had was a hundred pages and I tried to touch on issues as disparate as the power of advertising over the media to the handling journalists! And this is where the secret is to have a good editor, which I did in Sr Sue. She had been the supervisor for my master’s thesis, so I knew the demanding quality of her work!

If you ever had doubts about the importance of a good editor I can recommend a very long and hilarious article (it’s on the internet) entitled Black Day for the Blue Pencil by Blake Morrison who argues that although editors are today an endangered species because they no longer have enough time and they are sometimes regarded as mere proof-readers who must not be allowed to pollute the pure spring of the author’s inspiration, some of the best writers (TS Eliot for example) admitted that they could not have done what they did without them. He cites the example of one intrepid editor (who also edited Hemingway) who cut a writer’s novel down from 1.2 million words to a mere 450,000 and made it into a best seller. Unfortunately later on the author became paranoid about his editor, ditched him proclaiming that he was going to show the world that he could write alone, and promptly died. So the moral of that story is always be nice to your editor.

Editors make suggestions about what should be excluded from and included in your book. Even with the best editor one always finishes with the sense that it isn’t the last word and there should have been other things in it. I certainly feel that way about The Church and the Media.

For example, I wish the news about Vatican Radio going into advertising had come out while I was still writing. I do say quite a lot about advertising but Vatican Radio taking ads would have been a good illustration of how all-pervasive advertising is in all the different media. I argue that in fact many of the media would not exist without advertising and that there is a sense in which advertising is so powerful that we should perhaps view it as a medium in itself.

Hence I tend to agree with media commentators Detweiler and Taylor that although we do need to be critical of the sex and violence content of the media, we have perhaps missed the fact that, because of the power of advertising in the media, what we really need to be aware of is the extent to which all media these days (Vatican Radio included now) are relentlessly persuading us to shop till we drop. And what we need is a critical theology of consumption in to enable us to handle modern advertising.

I should perhaps say at least something about the general thrust of the book. It is largely inspired by Pope Paul’s pastoral instruction on the media of 1971, entitled Communio et Progressio. He was trying to show us how to put into practice the Vatican II document on the media, Inter Mirifica. For ‘further reading’ this cannot be bettered in my view. In it Paul VI develops the image of the media as ‘a great round table’ to which all, the poor included, should be invited. It’s a wonderful, inclusive, even democratic, image and one which holds out the hope that the media will really take everyone seriously and work not just to inform, educate and entertain, but really be an instrument for social progress.

Something which caught people’s eye in the advertising ironically is the suggestion that the Christian Churches collaborate to produce a ‘Christian Al Jazeera’. Now I doubt if this is going to happen any time soon, but it might make us think a little. If you look at Al Jazeera you will find a really professional TV channel, truly international in reach, which represents a Muslim view of the world. But note that despite the pervasive suspicion in much of the world about Islam and religious belief in general, Al Jazeera is generally trusted. That seems to me to be an amazing achievement. We could do well to ask ourselves how Al Jazeera does it and whether we could do it ourselves. After all, the church’s image is not in the greatest shape in the world today. So my suggestion of a Christian Al Jazeera is a playful way of teasing our minds into thought about what makes media coming from a religious background successful, and what does not.

A word of thanks. I couldn’t have written The Church and the Media without the many people I consulted and whom I’d like to thank – Fr Emile Blaser of Radio Veritas, Gunther Simmermacher and Chris Moerdyk of the Southern Cross, Else Strivens of Trefoil, Peter James-Smith and Sr Paula of this bookshop are the local people to whom I am indebted. Many thanks to you all for your help!

However the law works both ways – to Bashir’s advantage but also against it. His government is implicated in the violent Islamisation of the South of the country. This traumatic process has created large numbers of refugees. These are Southerners, who because (as the northern government insists), they are citizens of the country, have fled the fighting and moved to the capital Khartoum, seeking security and work, even if this meant putting up with a second class status.

An observer in Khartoum painted an interesting picture for me about how this has affected the Catholic Church in the capital. Christian communities there have had a rapid addition to their numbers thanks to the refugee influx. Many refugees are already Christian but many others who were religious traditionalists, have converted to Christianity and in the 14 Catholic parishes around Khartoum the Easter season sees the admission of 3000-5000 adults every year. For a government with an Islamising agenda, this is another example of that perplexing and sometimes maddening law of unintended consequences.

There’s another twist in the working out of this law. The largely black Southern refugees in Khartoum are an ethnic mix of perhaps a million souls, (though the Government estimates them at just over 200,000). Because they are drawn from all the different ethnic groups, in order to lessen if not completely avoid tribal divisions in parish communities, the Archbishop of Khartoum has insisted that all services be conducted in Arabic. This even includes singing. The Archbishop, it seems, comes from a family of accomplished musicians that has produced a large repertoire of hymns and parts of the Mass in Arabic and my source (a fluent Arabic speaker and good singer) judges them to be very beautiful. The point here is that part of the North’s Islamising strategy was the imposition of Arabic on the southerners. But right in the capital this has backfired in our now familiar law. What was supposed to carry the message of Islam has ended up being used to carry the message of the Christian Gospel!

In the broad political tableau, the same thing has happened. The attempt to unify the country through the imposition of a uniform religious culture now seems ultimately doomed, though Bashir and his government, buoyed up by the President’s popularity windfall courtesy of the International Court, do not seem yet ready to admit this.

Things will come to a head in 2011 when, according to the agreement grudgingly entered into by the Government under intense pressure from the West, the South will have a referendum to decide its future status. All sources close to the situation in the South suggest that the vote will be overwhelmingly in favour of full independence. The Southerners, it seems, have had enough. This was not how the Northern government’s script was meant to run. The South, with its considerable oil wealth, was to continue being dominated and exploited and the people progressively culturally and religiously absorbed.

The endgame is already in motion and the shape of its dynamic is becoming clear. South Africans who were around in the transitions years leading up to 1994 will find it depressingly familiar. It’s the crude tactic of violent destabilisation. The Bashir government is already doing all it can to hobble the embryonic Southern state, setting one ethnic group against an other and paying militias to attack each other. What did not work in South Africa in 1994 will probably not work in 2011 in Southern Sudan.

The most amateur crystal-ball gazer can foresee more violence given the sky-high stakes of large swathes of oil-rich territory. The final outcome of this coming violent struggle will probably be decided more by the extremely delicate matter of international relations between the West and the Arab world and the raw economics of energy. However, a situation which has produced so many unintended outcomes is likely to produce even more.

For Catholics this was probably most keenly felt in the way the ANC handled the abortion legislation, not only tabling it enthusiastically against the general opinion in the country, but also imposing a three-line whip on its MPs to force them to vote for it. Other disappointments were the failure to support church schools and health institutions as much as was hoped. Religious and laypeople working in church-run health institutions, especially those for people living with HIV/AIDS, also experienced a sense of being let-down by the new government. However, it is not only our own institutions for which Christians feel concern. Many would consider the failure of the ANC to bring the majority of government schools out of their third-rate, apartheid status, to be their most egregious fault.

Another serious issue is morally tainted politicians. The fact is that the ruling party (and some members of opposition parties), have fallen quite considerably from grace since the struggle days. With power has come a sense of entitlement which has led many morally weaker politicians astray. The arms deal, the so-called Travelgate scandal and other disedifying episodes have left many wondering whether this is the same group that was so self-sacrificing in the period before 1994. The carrying of Tony Yengeni to prison as if he were a hero symbolised the scandal all too graphically.

Added to this is the failure to nip the rot in the bud. The leadership periodically makes statements about how it will not tolerate corruption but then ‘re-deploys’ those who are guilty of it. The cloud hanging over Jacob Zuma sums up the problem. But it is also true that some of the new Cope leadership, though ‘refugees’ from the ANC, stand accused in the court of public opinion of having been complicit in the its moral decline.

A sub-theme to the corruption issue is a sense, not so much of Afro-pessimism, but Afro-fatalism. This is the notion that all sub-Saharan African states are doomed to go the way of Zimbabwe, Somalia or Congo because of the entitled clinging to power of what William Mervyn Gumede calls ‘liberation aristocrats’.  Afro-fatalism makes one ask gloomily what is the point of fighting our historically and/or culturally determined fate.

A final issue is a general sense of disempowerment, which is shared by other religious groups, and which will almost inevitably afflict believers when a state goes secular. For Catholics, who are in a small minority, this feeling can be particularly acute, especially since in the past we felt that we punched above our weight because of our respected Catholic institutions, which have now been weakened. So we now have an extremely dominant party in power with a secular – and in some areas – a secularist agenda.

Two possible reactions can flow from the above. One is to withdraw into a denominational ghetto, concentrate on our ‘own affairs’ and not bother to vote. Another version of the same is to completely compartmentalise our politics and our Christianity that we do not let the teaching of the Church touch our politics or vice-versa, and we mechanically vote as we have always done. We ‘split’ ourselves into religious and political animals and refuse to allow the two to meet. Such ‘splitting’ is said to be psychologically unhealthy because it blocks the integration which is so important in the maturation of the adult human person. It is also theologically inappropriate because although Christianity can never be reduced to a political ideology, it has to be lived out in a particular socio-political reality and must always recall its founder’s concern for the poor, the sick and the abandoned. In other words, it must enable its message to engage with the reality of the public life of the day.

Perhaps the first thing to do about our disillusionment and disempowerment is to acknowledge them. Yes, we do feel let down, many of us. Yes, we do feel far less relevant in the body politic than we felt in the past. Yes, we sense that our faith has been effectively marginalised in the new secular regime. However just withdrawing into our local pastoral/spiritual concerns and our personal shells is no solution. The less we engage, the less we make our voices heard, the more likely the government will ride even rougher shod over our concerns and become even more neglectful of our institutions. We will end up counting for even less.

It seems clear that we need to find new modes of engagement in the political process other than vaguely hoping to be of influence on the coat tails of the ruling party. These new approaches will take time to develop. In the meantime there is the urgency of the upcoming election. Suffice to say here that opting out and failing to vote is more likely to weaken democracy than to strengthen it. One of the crucial factors in the collapse of real democracy in Zimbabwe was the high rate of emigration – the ultimate geographical opting out. Had those millions who left not done so, things might have been very different. Sometimes South Africans predict fatalistically that we are headed towards ‘Zimbabwefication’ or ‘Zanufication’, but such prophecies become self-fulfilling when democrats withdraw from democracies. So things might not be all that rosy in our democracy, but one of the basic functions of voting is to keep the democratic process alive for the future. We vote for our children’s sake, not just for our own.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the practicalities of our electoral system, which has its critics but nonetheless has features which are designed to limit political power. When we cast our vote for the national assembly that vote goes towards the election of 200 MPs in that body. When we cast our provincial vote, this gets counted twice, first towards the election of the provincial assembly and secondly towards the election of the other 200 MPs in the national assembly. The weighting of our provincial vote for the purpose of voting in   representatives in the national assembly depends on the population of our province. This is one reason why KZN, the Eastern and Western Cape and Gauteng are being so hotly contested. This is important to remember because it puts a considerable measure of strategic power in the hands of voters, power to send signals to our politicians and even ultimately to affect the political balance in the land.

A practical process of voter-discernment for Christians would look something like this. Firstly to deepen our awareness of the breadth and wisdom of Christian social teaching. Secondly to familiarise ourselves with the different party political manifestos. Finally to make a prayerful and prudent judgement about which party (or indeed configuration of parties in Parliament) will most serve the common good of South Africa. This will always involve choosing lesser evils, since all politicians and all parties are flawed because they share the human condition and in that sense simply mirror us, the electorate.

However by voting in numbers, Christian South Africans have a chance to participate in a renewal and revitalisation of our young democracy which has been made prematurely jaded by a mixture of stale ideology and greedy entitlement. The long-term hope should be that this election will be a wake-up call for complacent politicians also provide some ‘political space’ for the Church to develop a viable way of engaging more effectively with the new political reality of a secular South Africa in the future.

There are some unintended outcomes worth noting. One is that for those people for whom English is a second language this change is simply not their first priority, and therefore they are unlikely to assimilate it easily. I was in Zimbabwe recently to give a short retreat to a group of young male religious from all over Africa. When I asked them whether we would be using the new texts, they looked completely blank. Many had never even heard of them. On reflection it was of course obvious that in a country where in some places the sign of peace has been discouraged because of cholera, liturgical language is way down on their present scale of concerns.

So it would seem likely that because this second-language group is less concerned about the issue than native speakers, they will keep the old ICEL text as a kind of ‘default’ version. Most probably won’t have enough practice to get the new texts into their heads even if they think it worthwhile printing the leaflets. We are actually talking about a lot of people – countries like India, the Philippines and Nigeria where there are substantial populations of second language English-speakers who sometimes do celebrate in English.

In similar vein, I recently led a workshop for some religious sisters in Johannesburg, most of whom were second-language English-speakers. We didn’t have any leaflets available so we decided to use the old ICEL version with the exception of including the response ‘And with your spirit’. It was an awkward hybrid, and probably not the first or last!

Another potential force for liturgical division lies in the recent permission given to celebrate the Tridentine rite. Among native English speakers I have heard several people remark wryly that if the Latin Mass Society has the right to use the Tridentine version, what is there to stop a ‘Vatican II Society’ claiming their right to stick to the old ICEL Mass? If the Church was unable to resist the demands of a small group like the Latin Mass Society, it’s unlikely to be able to say no to the much larger numbers that might to want to celebrate in the old ICEL version.

I cite these examples point to the possible unintended outcome of a kind of Protestant fragmentation. We could end up with four versions of the Roman rite in the English-speaking world – Tridentine, Vatican II Latin, old ICEL and new (Vox Clara) ICEL. Plus hybrids.

One also needs to bear in mind here that a widely-spoken language like English tends naturally to break up into dialects. So when one has a generally accepted text being used over such a broad language group, one has to think quite carefully about how to go about changing it. Chipping away at the statue, even with the admirable aim of improving it, might just cause it to shatter. The irony of this is that diversification was definitely not the aim – rather the opposite: a universal use was envisaged, which is precisely what we might lose.

It would seem from reaction so far here in South Africa, that there is considerable unhappiness with the texts themselves among first-language speakers. Perhaps this should have been foreseen. It’s hard enough to be told how to speak one’s own language under the best of circumstances. If those circumstances are that the prescribed speech feels like a clumsy, clinging translation (‘faithful, but not beautiful’ as the French would say), and that rather better texts have been sidelined, one must expect a reaction. But presumably the assumption was that the reception would be a smooth matter. A miscalculation perhaps, and something to be noted by other English-speaking regions.

I wonder if the memory of the change from the Tridentine to the vernacular rite may have played a part in the forming of this assumption. Because for all the unhappiness caused for a minority by that change, the move from Tridentine Latin to vernacular English (and all the other languages of the universal Church), went remarkably smoothly and was generally well received. I suspect that the theological ‘tide in the affairs of men’ was just right for such a shift. The texts themselves had a simple beauty and power, we had been prepared by the Council, the change came with the full authority of that Council. Do similar conditions hold today I wonder?

Where to from here? It probably all depends on what happens in the English-speaking ‘big five’ – the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia/New Zealand and Ireland. If the new texts are received with open arms in these countries then fragmentation probably won’t happen or will be limited. On the other hand if there is considerable resistance we could end up with a very messy dog’s breakfast indeed. Any hope of a single international version for the English liturgy could be lost forever.

It might be prudent, therefore, for the ‘big five’ to do further research to avoid the possibility of worse versions of what is happening here. The liturgical unity of the English-speaking Catholic church might depend on it. A simple, practical step would be for English-speaking hierarchies to implement the new texts as an experiment in a few selected dioceses and after a year or so gauge the reception. If the new texts get a full and joyful reception among priests and people in those experimental dioceses, all well and good. If not, then there will still be the chance to think again and commission something more suitable.

My personal conviction is that the people of God understand that only the best is good enough for the sacred liturgy and that they will recognise that best when they hear it.

One of the problems with ‘silent’ retreats is that they sometimes aren’t silent at all because the place where the retreat takes place might be actually quite noisy. This is sometimes true of retreat houses themselves where one would think that silence could be assumed. Why is this? Part of the problem seems to be to do with the reality of money. Retreat houses are notoriously difficult to finance, and therefore those who run them need to maximise the number of groups and individuals that they welcome. The more guests, the better the budget balances.

But this means, for example, that two groups might be on retreat simultaneously, one Pentecostal and the other Ignatian, which is fine for the Pentecostals but hard for the Ignatians. Or one might have a group of hearty clerical holidaymakers who watch a lot of television staying at the same time as the ‘silents’. Recently I was staying in a large mission with a retreat house on the grounds, near which my living quarters were situated. One night I was kept awake by a Pentecostal group doing what sounded alarmingly like exorcisms. There were loud shouts of, ‘Phuma Sathane! Phuma!’ And in case Satan was an English-speaker, they added, ‘Out Satan! Out!’ Happily I was not on retreat but one can only imagine what it would have been like for anyone seeking silence and recollection.

Sometimes the problem is just poor organisation. There really is no excuse for allowing the gardener to time his cutting of the grass to coincide with a silent retreat. If the administrative office or the kitchen of a retreat house are adjacent to the chapel, they shouldn’t be and the house needs to be re-designed. And if no one has ever told the staff that silence is important during a silent retreat and therefore they should keep their voices down, this is surely a failure on the part of the house’s administration.

The silent retreatant is by definition silent and therefore not likely to complain. His or her problems with noise are therefore unlikely to be noticed. If, however, when we are organising our silent retreat, we enquire whether the house will be quiet when we are there, then we might make our point in a subtle form of negotiation – no silence; no show.

I suspect that the subtlest level of this problem lies in the vague notion from certain spiritual writing that it is up to the retreatant to provide his or her own silence, inner and outer. Of course there is truth to this idea. Unless I keep quiet and cultivate an inner attitude of recollection, I will never be able to make a silent retreat even in a Carthusian monastery. But the retreatant does not lose the sense of hearing when on retreat; indeed, the senses are often sharpened up. Therefore silence in the sense of a real absence of human and mechanical noise is indispensable.

It has to be said that most retreat houses do make an effort, especially when those running them know that the group wants eight or thirty days of Ignatian silence. But it takes continual effort to maintain silence, especially with the group that may be so quiet you begin to forget it’s even there.

There is one establishment in this country in which silence is guaranteed, and it is perhaps instructive to note how it is achieved. The director keeps a firm and determined control of everything that might cause noise. He only does silent retreats. He disallows casual visitors and only accepts people he knows to be serious about silence and silent retreats. He pre-empts potential sources of noise – e.g. the kitchen – by doing the cooking himself! By now, some readers will have identified this quiet and beautiful spot. Few retreat houses could emulate such an example perfectly, but they might take a leaf or two out of its book.

Morris West in his memoirs reminds us of the words he puts into the mouth of Giordano Bruno in his play, The Heretic:

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language!
We have made a cage of words
And shoved our God inside, as boys confine
A cricket or a locust, to make him sing
A private song! And look what great gob-stopping
Words we use for God’s simplicity,
Hypostasis and homoousion!
We burn men for these words – a baboon chatter
Of human ignorance! – we burn men! (p102)

A powerful condemnation of the misuse of words, done with words and an illustration that it is an inescapable and abiding fact is that we live in and by language. We work, create, do, within language whose words give meaning to our life and world and make the very way we live possible. There are very few human activities we could conduct without words, from putting up a house to educating a child to engaging in commerce to organising a political party to shaping a society.

Many of these areas of discourse involve persuasion and the moving of hearers through eloquence. Despite the much quoted activist credo of ‘deeds, not words’, in fact many of the deeds implicitly being encouraged here either involve words or actually are words. Making peace involves many words, as does a vast spectrum of other worthy human actions – thinking, inventing, intervening, leading, recognising, organising, entertaining, loving, praying. In an age of democratic consultation, the tedious meeting is an indispensable step to achieving anything, and meetings involve many, many words.

Like all things human these activities which are intimately involved with words can be manipulated, hijacked and perverted to the service of evil. But it fails to follow that we can opt out of language and make do with ‘dumb’ acts. It suffices to imagine the chaos that would occur if the human race were to be suddenly struck speechless. The Babylon myth tells a simple but deep truth – without the communication of language human activity becomes impossible, the transgressing tower cannot be built, but neither can anything else.

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