The substance of Archbishop Charles Scicluna’s tweet expressing concern at the destruction of virgin land at Żonqor to build a ‘university’ as proposed by a Jordanian developer is very similar to the position taken in public by Godfrey Farrugia, the government Whip.
It has also been announced that during Cabinet meetings, Environment Minister Leo Brincat also showed concern about the environmental impact of the project. This notwithstanding, the Archbishop has been taken to task by the inhabitants of the blogosphere and the Twitter universe. He was called all sorts of names and accused of plotting all sorts of subversive nefariousness against the government.
Scicluna is not alone in his occasional forays in the different confines of cyberspace and concomitant controversies. Many religious leaders do the same.
Pope Francis followed the lead of Pope Benedict and tweets to his 6.16 million followers. He is upped by the Dalai Lama who has 11 million followers.
But Francis can find consolation that he outruns the Egyptian Muslim preacher, Amr Khaled (4.25 million followers) and definitively trumps Richard Dawkins, the British atheist intellectual with ‘just’ 1.16 million followers. Scicluna’s followers are nowhere so numerous. For those who are not very familiar with Twitter, may I point out that it is just a nine-year-old online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called ‘tweets’. Twitter has over 288 million monthly active accounts.
Did Scicluna overstep his competence? Is he being pastorally negligent? Would it not be better if he just shuts up or confines himself to ambones and pulpits singing the praises of some mega-martyr and pontificating on innumerable ethereal subjects?
One can address the question from the perspective of the content of the Archbishop’s tweets. The Archbishop should restrict himself to evangelisation, some opined.
Pope Francis, in his encyclical ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, answers that “evangelisation would not be complete if it did not take account of the unceasing interplay of the Gospel and of man’s concrete life, both personal and social”. Touché.
Scicluna should speak in general and opaque terms without being concrete, some said. Pope Francis is of a different opinion.
In the same encyclical letter he clearly states the Church cannot help but be concrete and that it should steer away from expressing mere generalities that challenge no one.
“There is a need to draw practical conclusions, so they will have greater impact on the complexities of current situations”.
Pope Francis will be publishing another encyclical letter totally focussed on the environment
Those who say that religion should confine itself to the private sphere and the salvation of souls find no comfort in Pope Francis’s words: “It is no longer possible to claim that religion should be restricted to the private sphere and that it exists only to prepare souls for heaven.
No one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life, without concern for the soundness of civil institutions, without a right to offer an opinion on events affecting society”.
It seems that regarding the content of his tweet, Scicluna is in much better company than that of those who rave and rant on Facebook.
Moreover, Pope Francis, in the coming days, will be publishing another encyclical letter totally focussed on the environment. Basing oneself on positions taken by Pope Francis about the environment one can safely assume that its content will definitively be more extensive and much more radical than Scicluna’s tweet!
But besides content, there are other aspects of the Church’s use of social media that should be explored. Prof. Stefan Gelfgren, in the academic journal Nordicom Review, published a paper titled ‘Why does the Archbishop not tweet?”
Gelfren does not study Scicluna’s tweets but a series of such communications attributed to the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran Church, which were tweeted during the summer of 2012. It had turned out that the tweets were not made by the Lutheran archbishop but an information officer within the Church who later identified himself. He tweeted in this manner to create a debate about the subject.
Gelfren’s study of this case raises a number of issues that should be kept in mind by the Church when it uses social media. I hasten to add all media, since the media is not a neutral conveyer of messages. The media mould the message, as rightly pointed out by Innis’s slogan that the things that words are written on are more important than the words themselves.
Through Twitter, for example, one can only communicate messages that can be expressed through only 140 characters, something which definitively influences what one can communicate. The social media is not in any way in the control of the Church or any large institution for that matter. Thus, the Church’s traditionally hierarchical way of communicating is definitively not suited to cyberspace.
Cyberspace is made of many centres. Mediatised society in the digital age is flat, rather than vertical. Institutional authority is challenged, many times not even recognised as an authority.
Traditional dogmatism is shunned, though a secular kind of dogmatism is rampant.
Whoever enters cyberspace does so on equal footing with the rest, while potentially opening oneself to unjust, uninformed and negative criticism.
The process of secularism makes the task of the Church harder in the blogosphere, even in countries such as Malta, marked as it is with a strong community of ‘cultured – in contrast to evangelised – Christians’ on one side, and the hardcore nostalgic on the other.
Scicluna seems to be conscious of all this, so much so he has made it amply clear that his ventures in cyberspace are not official pronouncements but personal opinions.
Some refute the possibility of this distinction, others are puzzled by it. I think it is legitimate for such a medium. Given these parameters this is a calculated risk well taken.
As Gelfren aptly notes: “If the Church wants to stay relevant, it has to adapt and learn how to engage in communication, an argument that is logical if one agrees with the concept of mediatised society.”
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt