In South Africa the first black Anglican archbishop was considered to be Public Enemy Number One – the result of years of demonisation by the state-controlled mass media. The congregations of the Sydney-backed Church of England in South Africa (CESA) were boosted by panicked white Anglicans fleeing their own church after Bishop Tutu’s election to the top job.

By the late ‘eighties, even before the Internet, new technology had made it possible for the church to create its own communications networks through e-mail and desk-top-publishing. So the churches in South Africa became pioneers of the new media as a consequence of the apartheid state’s stranglehold on mass media organisations.

In July this year, 22 years later, World Youth Day (WYD) launched the website Xt3 (Christ in the Third Millennium) and the Pope texted his greetings to thousands of pilgrims on their arrival in Sydney.

Trevor Cook wrote on Crikey.com, Australia’s first non-corporate news website, that WYD had re-positioned the Catholic Church, two millennia old, as alive and well and relevant to a whole new generation of enthusiastic adherents, millions of them, around the world.

“At face value, the Church should be out of date and on the way out. Celibacy, all-male hierarchies, opposition to birth control, abhorrence of homosexuality, miracles, intelligent design – it’s all stuff that sits so oddly with the ordinary values of contemporary society.

“But through all this, the Catholic Church, like the British monarchy, has shown a remarkable ability to reinvent itself and stay relevant while holding on to the age-old traditions that act like a security blanket for many people.

“WYD is a bloody good show. Hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world having fun without drugs or alcohol provides remarkable images in a media that is otherwise saturated with all that alcopop binge horror epidemic stuff. Those WYD pictures are the most hopeful we’ve seen for quite a while.

“Part of the trick, of course, is the old Roman idea of ‘bread and circuses’. The Catholic Church is, after all, a vestige of the old Roman Empire from which it borrowed much of its administrative structure...

“Moreover, the Pope played straight to the Church’s strength. He spoke out against materialism and urged people to lead ‘deeper’ lives. A few decades ago, in the midst of the biggest surge in material well being in human history, only hippies and other crackpots talked along these lines but now it is a mainstream community concern.

“Nevertheless, few people are ready to embrace poverty and a life of self-denial. So the idea that you can be part of the Church and have ‘fun’, and be spiritual at the same time, is a real winner.”

Crikey.com was not uncritical of course. Nicholas Pickard wrote; “(T)he problem always will be that World Youth Day was an exclusive event controlled through the compulsory registration of participants. It has left a sour taste “And now the Cardinal is being incensed by the deacon.” SBS commentator during the Opening Mass of World Youth Day 08 in Sydney. Common Theology — Winter 2008 11 in the mouths of those not involved with this particular strand of religion.

“Unlike the Olympics or the Sydney Festival, the people of Sydney found themselves catering to a very specific cross-section of society. I can only imagine how the Protestant factions of the Christian Church felt over the last seven days.”

Pickard seems unaware that the event was largely ecumenical and included interfaith meetings with the Pope.

He went on to report that a protest of one thousand people gathered in the gay heart of Oxford Street to voice their concerns about the Catholic Church and its dominant political and social policies. “Lesbians and gays joined with socially liberal Christians, atheists, disaffected Catholics and representatives from Broken Rites.

“They made it clear during all of their speeches that they weren’t anti-Catholic but rather they demanded tolerance and acceptance. Even when a stray group of young American pilgrims found themselves in the middle of the protest they were greeted with smiles and good humour. “And it was smiles and good humour that really summed up the week. I found myself on the final day of WYD sitting on a pub balcony watching the thousands of pilgrims returning. Sitting with a few locals we waved and cheered them for no particular reason.

“The local drunk kept yelling at those carrying banners and flags asking where they were from. This was always followed by a cheer. We waved goodbye and found ourselves exactly the same as when the arrived. Nothing has changed and it is such a shame that after all that money, after all those people and all that effort, most of us... weren’t included.”

This report from a self-described ‘outsider’ opens several important portals for dialogue should the churches be interested. The problem is, the churches appear not to be interested in today’s mass media marketplace, except on their own terms.

Xt3 has no links and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s site has a policy of no links, which seems to illustrate the churches’ attitude on the Internet – today’s marketplace. They want to be in the playground but they don’t want to play; they want a voice but they don’t want a conversation.

The church has in fact become part of the breakdown of communication instead of being in the vanguard of the world’s struggle for a new language, a logos, for 21st Century spirituality. Ironically, the Church is ideally placed to declare the Good News amidst all the bad news of food and fuel shortages and climate change. We have to radically change our lifestyle. Western economics is built on consumerism and the premise of wealth as goods and services. The dilemma is that to save the planet westerners have to adapt to a lifestyle which would undermine the current economic order.

In this situation the Church can declare the good news (which would be political suicide for our secular leaders to deliver) that a simpler lifestyle in the so-called developed world would not only give us a chance to save the human species but be good for our health and happiness.

The Church has the most globally pervasive culture, networks and infrastructure in the world - and considerably more moral power than the United Nations. The Church really does not need to waste its time prescribing to politicians how to change the world – they are powerless in the current crisis. The Church has the people power that is needed to change the way we live.

“The media is the water in which the fish swim”

Quote from Bill Murray, great newspaperman and former Editor of Brisbane’s Sunday Sun.

But the mainstream churches do not have the necessary tools of corporate leadership to speak with authority in the public arena because they have not woken up to the fact that the mass media is the environment in which we live – it is not merely a resource to manipulate or be manipulated by.

The power of the media as a cultural environment was demonstrated in apartheid South Africa where an entire nation was so brainwashed by the ideologues who came to power in 1948 that within a generation the minority white population and a large proportion of the black population could not discern the difference between right and wrong in the moral fog of apartheid.

It is an anomaly that the mass media are owned by the corporations. The mass media, like politics, is rightly the property of the people. Given the conflict of interest between the health of the planet and the economic goals of the corporations, their monopoly of the mass media could prove to be fatal for the whole world.

Today the technological climate is much more amenable to the creation of worldwide alternative media networks than it was in South Africa in 1986. Facebook and YouTube 1. have built worldwide communities almost overnight. Journalists on every continent are making moves to reclaim the Fourth Estate from the corporations – ProPublica’s public interest journalism in the USA; Crikey.com here in Australia where public journalism was pioneered during the Sydney Olympics.

More problematic than the technology is the churches’ adversarial and defensive relationship . with mass media following decades of misunderstanding, mismanagement and bruising encounters. This may have something to do with the fact that the Church itself monopolised the mass media before the Renaissance and has never quite given up its culture of control.

But it would be as well for the churches to bear the cost to their centralised authority of joining moves to retrieve the mass media from the monopoly of the corporations. Otherwise the Church in this age will be remembered for child sexual abuse, obsession with gender issues and bizarre definitions of sexuality, while the world sinks beneath the waves.

Maggie Helass is Editor of Common Theology and has worked in church media relations in Australia, Southern Africa and England

1. Social spaces on the Internet.