REVISED 03/22/07
In one of many moments of frustration with the intellectual and cultural limitations of fellow Catholics, a very talented Catholic writer--and some of you will recognize whom it is--once declared "The Jews really are smarter!"
Well, the Jews are smarter in that they have always seen value in the arts and have always supported the arts with financial support. Or with respect at the very least.
Not so with Catholics. I won't get into the lamentable and depressing details here. It has to do with many--note that I write many, not all--Catholics being average, mediocre, uneducated philistines. The net result is that there is no such thing as a Catholic film industry. If there were any Catholic playwrights, Catholics wouldn't know about them because Catholics wouldn't be interested in them enough to spread the word about them. I myself wrote a book of Catholic fiction. Nobody cared, not even my local Catholic media of which I was a member. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Ring books are inspired by the last sentence of The [Catholic] Lord's Prayer ("Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.") had a similar experience with his work.
What Catholic TV there is is 24 hours of talking heads or people praying the Rosary or a camera lingering on an icon, painting or statue, occasionally zooming in or out. Every time I watch EWTN, I recall the movie guy in a picture about F. Scott snarling something like, "They're called motion pictures, Mr. Fitzgerald! Motion pictures!" to the subject who, as a hapless screenwriter, did not understand media that require action to be interesting. Visual media also require interesting settings and interesting-looking people to be interesting.
Recent efforts at Catholic radio have been disastrous or cannons that turned out to be popguns. A few years ago several wealthy investors, led by Rev. Joseph Fessio, S.J., started Catholic Family Radio, buying several radio stations and expecting their new Catholic talk format to be profitable. It wasn't, of course, and the stations were resold at a loss.
Catholic radio now includes a few small stations in the sticks (One can only imagine what they're like!) and Ave Maria Radio, something set up by Tom Monaghan (That man again!). Ave Maria Radio was supposed to be big, big, big, but after several years, it consists of only two stations in Michigan. Although one can't see the heads, that's what it also is: talking heads. Unfortunately, people who are willing to put money into Catholic radio expect it to be talk radio, something that evangelizes by yackety-yack.
There is great faith in yack radio these days, thanks to the long-term success of a couple of national talk-show hosts and of numerous local ones. However only about 16 percent of total radio listeners listen to yack radio(1). Most people still listen to radio that plays some kind of music. And music programming has been a constant in radio since its early days 80 years ago. Contrary to what the slogan of Washington, DC, all-news station WTOP claims ("Your favorite radio station doesn't play songs!"), all-news stations do play songs as background to stories. Music and radio go together.
Talk radio is now getting frayed around the edges. It's only a matter of time before yack listeners will get tired of hearing that the crooks who steal their pension funds are being prosecuted for "political reasons." A few more arrests on drug charges and listeners will realize that their radio idols are not great leaders but creeps out to get as much dough as they can by delivering corporate and neo-con propaganda. The non-controversial personality who keeps listeners company with a mixture of music, humor, local news, weather is slowly being rediscovered. The most popular kind of radio keeps one company and accomplishes that mostly by playing music.
Now, even if it is all-talk, Catholic radio in which there is talking about the world with a Catholic voice is better than Catholic radio that doesn't mention Catholicism at all, the type of radio that the Catholic establishment would emit. I shudder to think what the USCCB would come up with; thank God the bishops are broke. It would probably be something like Sound and Sense, a long-running program that was hosted by Paulist Fr. John Geaney. The content consisted of Geaney playing a hit secular pop song, let us say, Yellow Submarine, followed by Geaney's observation, something like, "Sometimes we find ourselves living in a yellow submarine. And then we realize: it's only a matter of time before it will surface."
No, nobody who has ventured into Catholic radio thus far has gotten it right. And Catholic radio will not be gotten right until there are producers who understand that radio is an art and that great art works on the emotional level.
Two things about the emotional level: 1) Great things can happen on the emotional level that can't happen on the intellectual level. 2) Evangelization also happens on the emotional level.
You wouldn't know it by the way some in the church go about evangelization--trying to bottle it and induce it by processes--that evangelization is a very emotional, very personal occurrence. People are evangelized by a million different personal experiences: good example, kindness, happy memories, beautiful stained glass windows, chicken dinners, music.
Music: there's that word again. Most people are not evangelized by Aquinas' proofs of God's existence or by Theology of the Body or by the Just War Theory or by someone dishing out advice on how to deal with a difficult child who doesn't want to go to school (Answer: Make it painful for him to sit down at home.). Something must happen to people on the emotional level before they can move on to dogma and wisdom.
Great radio is art that works on the emotional level. Most people turn on the radio to hear music. Music and radio naturally go together. Conclusion: To be attractive and evangelizing, Catholic radio programming must consist mostly of music.
"Music," said Christopher Walker, composer of The Celtic Alleluia and many other works that abound in Catholic hymnals, "is the church's secret weapon."
And music is also the Catholic Church's most developed art. There are centuries of material to draw on from Gregorian Chant through Palestrina through Thomas Talis through Gabriel Faure on up to the contemporary composers who have come along with the vernacular Mass. There are also heaps of great protestant hymns, many catchier than Catholic ones. Most hymns in English sung at Catholic Masses today are of protestant origin. There's nothing wrong with using the songs of other faiths as long as they don't express alien concepts such as laying trophies down or anti-Catholic sentiments or heretical ideas.
There is currently enough recorded music to keep a mostly-music Catholic network going for several days without repeating, however another thing to be hoped for is a lot more recorded music and a lot more variety. One thing that's lacking in Catholic recorded music are performances by large orchestras--There is nothing comparable to The Mormon Tabernacle Choir's orchestra--and recordings for a Catholic market tend to sound like low-budget efforts with only an organ, piano or synthesizer as accompaniment.
Of course a Catholic radio effort would never be profitable and would have to depend on financial contributions, but it could supplement its income by selling the recordings it plays to listeners. It could also sell books and other items related to the talk programs.
As for these talk programs, none of them would be longer than half an hour and the ones as long as that would be very few. No broadcast Masses or Rosaries. One can tell people in three minutes how to pray The Rosary, urge them to send for a pamphlet about it, hopefully with a donation, and then leave them to it. No listeners calling in.
Family Radio, a worldwide Evangelical network--By the way, another thing about a mostly-music format is that it can serve a global audience.--has, I think a great approach to mixing talk with music. It delivers talk about various subjects--Intelligent Design, marriage and family issues, appeals for contibutions--in one to three-minute packets every half hour. The listener who doesn't care about such subjects doesn't tune out because of too much talk and may actually become interested in the subjects and want to know more. Trying to dump a huge load on people at once just makes them run away.
To be revisited.
--NJC
(1) The State of the News Media: 2005 / Radio
Copyright © 2007 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.