I have no idea where my copy of the breviary is. Before the usual do-gooders who wish me well report me to some Roman sacred congregation, let me clarify. I refer to my printed breviary. Every day I download the Divine Office text of the day on my iPad and on my smartphone. What’s more, one of the favourite internet links on my laptop is the breviary. Therefore one can say that I always carry the breviary with me.
I also have an iMissal on my smartphone and on my iPad- Fr Joe Borg
I also have an iMissal on my smartphone and on my iPad and I confess that I have made use of it at times. Last Sunday during Mass at Għarb I saw someone following Mass on an iPad instead of using a printed Missal.
Recently the New Zealand bishops have mandated that priests are to use the printed missal instead of tablets, e-readers or mobile phones when celebrating the liturgy.
“All faiths have sacred books which are reserved for those rituals and activities which are at the heart of the faith,” the bishops authoritatively and most sagaciously proclaimed.
“The Catholic Church is no different, and the Roman Missal is one of our sacred books.” Rightly said as we do not want to be outdone by the Hindu, Buddhist or Shinto Joneses, do we? In a measured way, the New Zealand bishops continued: “Its physical form is an indicator of its special role in our worship.” iPads can be used for study they say, but for liturgy, niet niet!
I am no technophile who crusades for the use of technology during the liturgy. In fact I have on more than one occasion strongly criticised the faddish use of large screens in our churches. Many times their use devalues the mystique of the proclamation of the Word and shows poor knowledge of the grammar of visual language.
What I find intriguing in the statement of the New Zealand bishops is their emphasis on the physical form of the book as the outward sign if not the basis of its being sacred. Why is it that a handwritten text on a manuscript or mechanically printed on a piece of paper is sacred but it loses its sacral aura if is produced digitally on an electronic device. I am not advocating an iPad featuring the Bible, Fifty Shades of Grey, Angry Birds and the Missal all jumbled together. But could we not have just one electronic device with all the Missals, lectionaries and so forth instead of rows upon rows of shelves heaving with printed tomes?
I will not make a song and dance for the use of this sacred iPad, preferably blessed with holy water before use. It’s no skin off my nose. I am just highlighting that the New Zealand bishops’ statement is another example of the ambiguous relationship of the Church to communications technology. A few examples suffice.
The invention of printing was welcomed by many in the Church and printing presses were installed in abbeys and other church buildings. Some considered only manuscripts as real books. When Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II) wanted a copy of Le guerre civili he got a calligrapher to copy it instead of buying the printed book! For at that time in the 15th century some believed that the multiplication of copies of the same text is the work of the devil.
In 1893 the prestigious Catholic paper, Leipzeger Anzeiger, blamed the devil again, poor thing, for the invention of photography saying that this new invention bordered on the sacrilegious. Even though in 1867 Bishop Gioacchino Pecci (later the formidable Pope Leo XIII) waxed lyrical about photography.
This same ambivalent position characterised the reaction to the invention of the cinema and the radio. In 1896, when the Brothers Lumière made a film about the Passion of Oberammergau, the Church quickly jumped on the bandwagon and film cameras entered the Vatican to film Pope Leo XIII shortly after. Méliès made a film about Joan of Arc in 1890. The Vatican was among the first to make use of the radio and in 1931 Pope Pius XI inaugurated the Radio Vaticana Studios, most commonly known as the “radio of the Pope”.
Church documents were not always so fawning over these new media. In 1906, Pope Pius X prohibited seminarians in an “absolute manner” from reading newspapers and magazines, even those of the highest quality. (Today they just don’t bother reading them at all!)
What probably was the first Church document to discuss cinema was published by the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Pietro Gasparri, on the behest and in the name of the Pope on July 15, 1909.
This document prohibited priests, under the risk of suspension a divinis (prohibited from celebrating mass and the sacraments), to enter cinemas. This diktat remained in place until the First Roman Synod that was held in 1960! Imagine being so harshly castigated for watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!
In 1912, one holy Congregation noted that some films were being screened in churches. It decreed that this was “probably an occasion for danger and inconveniences” and therefore, with the approval of Pope Pius X, absolutely forbade the showing of films in churches.
In January 1927, the Holy Office declared that the Pope is “absolutely against” the transmission of Mass on the radio and reiterated his prohibition that any liturgical celebrations be filmed. Thirty years later, another pontiff, Pius XII, in his encyclical Miranda Prorsus “recommended with all his heart” this kind of broadcast.
In 1958, another sacred congregation prohibited the use of equipment mimicking the sound of bells. I used to boast that our parish church has the best bells in the world through the use of such a machine which I now find, to my chagrin, that they could be diabolical.
The examples abound but space is limited, but you get the drift.
It sometimes does happen that what one holy congregation condemns, another one, just as holy, lauds it to high heaven. What one Pope holds as degenerate another one decrees it to be virtuous!
Will the diktat on the use of the electronic missal be just another example of a ‘nay’ morphed into a recommended ‘aye’?