But what is the Church? And where, and in whom, does the Holy Spirit dwell? Does God’s presence in the Church permeate downwards and outwards – as nowadays it seems – exclusively from the Holy Father in Rome? Or does God dwell in all the faith communities of the world?28
The major achievement of Vatican II was in popularising an ancient conception of the Church: as Cornwell continues, the Council affirmed ‘that each group of Christians gathered around its bishop is in that place, "the fullness of the Church, the Spirit’s temple, sacrament of Christ".29 It is in this vein that many reformers, unhappy at the increasing conservatism and centralisation of the Church in Rome sought to remake the role of the global Church. In many ways the debate was an echo of the key question facing all faith
communities at a time of technological progress, declining church attendance, and changing moral values – the issue of secularism and, in particular, the question of the Vatican’s role in the Church’s response. As a response to this, the Vatican increasingly adopted a fortress mentality, with a greater emphasis on Rome and the Vatican as guardians of Catholic theology. Wills refers to this as ‘shrinking the body of Christ’, a replacement of the Eucharist by Rome.30 This was perhaps best expressed in the Church’s loss of its temporal powers – the Church Militant being replaced by the Church Spiritual. This recentring, of course, was dependent on the papal embodiment of the Petrine lineage described above.
Closely related to this, however, is the Vatican’s approach to mass communications. As Bull has argued,
The essence of the purpose of the Catholic Church, and of the Papacy, armed with the Gospel – the Good News – is to communicate. Before literacy was widespread, the medieval Church used wall paintings to teach the dogmas of the faith. Bulls, briefs and encyclicals have poured out of the Vatican over the centuries.31
So the entry of the Church into the televisual age is no anachronism, and indeed the rise of televangelism has been identified by the Vatican as a potential threat, resulting in an enthusiastic embrace of mass media.
Here, the material space of St Peter’s and the virtual space of television and media interact in a complex way. As the first televisual Pope, John Paul II has shown himself to be a highly skilled media performer:
More alert than his aides, the pope quickly recognised the sheer dramatic power of his office. No other world leader celebrated open-air triumphs against such unabashedly theatrical backdrops. No secular leader could routinely address hundreds of thousands of citizens in mass meetings anywhere on earth. The forceful personality of John Paul II lit up the TV screen. Images of him standing in the popemobile, arms extended in greeting, of him kneeling to kiss the ground of yet another country swept the television screens of the world. Without TV the ‘Wojtyla phenomenon’ of the 1980s could never have existed. . . . Beneath the eye of the camera, his global evangelization came to life. John Paul II was the first pope to understand the television era, the first one who mastered the medium, who could handle a microphone, who was used to performing in public. People watched him against the backdrop of
6.2
St Peter’s is increasingly hemmed in by the car and the coach
exotic panoramas: sailing down tropic rivers, standing on slopes of sacred volcanoes, or walking in the shadow of soaring skyscrapers – like some omnipresent Master of the Universe.32
The universality of the Church’s message and the universality of television thus seem well matched. And latterly, the rise of the internet has also promised both challenge and opportunity for the Church, in a way that prob – lematises its whole spatiality.
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6.3 St Peter’s Square, 2000 |
The general audiences the Pope gives to large crowds in the Vatican every Wednesday and at which he delivers impromptu greetings and a formal address which is subsequently printed and distributed are also aimed, with a mixture of calculation and simplicity, at securing worldwide hearing. It is a unique form of communication: the personality and mystique of the white-robed figure of the Pope; the emotional response of the crowd. . .; the repetition by the Pope week after week of the fundamental teachings of the Gospel and their application to contemporary events; the diffusion of the message, or the recounting of the experience, by thousands on their return home.33
6.4 Here I want to flesh out some of the issues of embodiment which
Berninis curva have emerged in relation to the papacy, in the spirit of recent calls for a greater
sud
attention to how geographers, particularly, might give more attention to issues of performance and embodiment.34 Here, I focus on the nature of the Pope as mobile, and his use of mobility technology that was relatively unavailable to his predecessors, completely transforming the nature of the papacy in terms of visibility.
Television and visibility
The problem about the Universal Church is how to make it more visible. There are tendencies in theology and above all in the Orthodox Church to reduce everything to the level of the local church. But the church was born universal from the moment it began in Jerusalem. Saint Paul’s travels, Saint Peter’s coming to Rome, the Apostolic tradition, everything confirms the Petrine tradition of giving the church its universal dimension. And it seems to me that my travels help to make it more visible.35
The papacy of John Paul II has been marked by his desire to reach out to Catholics worldwide, a hugely diverse audience. Here, pilgrimage has been
strongly encouraged, with the 2000 Holy Year being exploited as a means of re-emphasising Rome’s centrality to the Church in a post-Conciliar age. We could summarise this position in three ways. First, as with Pius XII, St Peter’s Square has been used as a choreographed space. Yet, for John Paul II, we see this linked to an understanding of the importance of spectacle in the televisual age, perhaps reflecting the need to actively compete with global religions. In many ways this was a call for a new papal skill, the polylingual celebrity Pope, which Wojtyla embraced from his very first address:
When on October 22 [1978] he appeared in St Peter’s Square to celebrate the mass inaugurating his pontificate, he seemed fully invested with the mission entrusted to him by God. . . The Square was full of people, two hundred thousand of them. . . Watching him by satellite, believers and nonbelievers alike from a hundred nations assisted at the solemn ritual by which the Roman Church raises a man to its post of supreme dignity, transforming him into a splendid monarch like the emperors of Byzantium. For the first time, Karol Wojtyla sat on his throne, the papal cathedra. As the strains of the ancient litany of the saints faded away, amid clouds of incense enveloping the altar, the first cardinal deacon, Pericle Felici, approached the new pope, placing on his shoulders the sacred pallium, a white wool stole interwoven with little black crosses, the emblem of papal power. . . John Paul II spoke with a professional’s rhythmic intonations, measuring the pauses, breaking off for moments of applause. . . ‘Be not afraid!’ he declared, all but shouting. ‘Open up, no, swing wide the gates to Christ. Open up to his saving power the confines of the state, open up economic and political systems, the vast empires of culture, civilization, and development’ . . . This wasn’t so much a mass as a call to arms. John Paul II spoke in Italian, Polish, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and – turning towards the lands of the East – Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian.36
Here, then, papal primacy has been meshed with secular celebrity, where the Pope has consciously emphasised the embodied nature of his post in a not dissimilar way to televangelists. Extending Tomlinson’s discussion of mediation and public intimacy under globalisation,37 the nature of the Pope-faithful relationship has altered substantially. And the striking nature of this is the centrality of St Peter’s as a kind of TV studio. Indeed, the hordes of pilgrims became so huge that at certain times of the year extra sites in Rome had to be found, such as the staging of the mammoth youth Jubilee of August 2000 at Tor Vergata on the city’s periphery. Yet here, too, the papal presence was followed intently: La Repubblica reported that Rai, the Italian state broadcasting service had devoted 90 fixed TV cameras and 7 mobile cameras (mounted on cars, motorcycles and helicopters) to cover the event38. In sharp contrast to US televangelists, the mythic richness of Catholicism – the formal attire, the codified and dramatic singing, the power of rhetoric, the Pope’s linguistic skill (and his ready audience) is provided by the powerful stage of St Peter’s.
This focus on mediation cannot be dissociated from the above discussion of pilgrimage, which holds a paradoxical place within the Church’s development. Progressives, particularly during the Second Vatican Council, noted the importance of the ‘people of God’ and the ‘Church on the move’, where the communality of the process reflected an active participation in Christian practice. Others, drawing particularly on Pius XII’s embodiment of Roman Christian values, and his use of orchestrated youth marches in St Peter’s Square, suggested that John Paul II had inherited the taste for an iconised, devotional style of mass worship which mystified the body and personality of the Pope. This was demonstrated most explicitly in the huge gathering held on the outskirts of Rome at Tor Vergata and St Peter’s in August 2000, during the ‘Giubileo dei Giovani’ (the youth jubilee), described in L’Espresso as follows:
When the white dot enters through the Bernini colonnades the enormous piazza ripples, sways, explodes in Mexican waves, in the choirs of the curva sud. They cry ‘we love you’ in every language. They sing in one voice the Emmanuel, the official hymn of the gathering. . . Such a scene has never been seen before in Piazza San Pietro. It is the apotheosis of the pontificate of Pope Wojtyla. John Paul II superstar.39
Over a million young people (nicknamed the ‘Papa boys’ in the Italian press) made the pilgrimage to Rome, and – added to the global television broadcasting that covered the event – marked the logical extension of John Paul II’s opening to the media age. A few years earlier at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Bob Dylan was among those invited to perform before mass Catholic youth, a notable embrace of popular culture.