Recently, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, gave a one-hour speech in Dhaka, Bangladesh, based on Pope Benedict XVI’s message for World Communications Day next May 10.

In that message, the Pope invites priests “to make astute use of the unique possibilities offered by modern communications.”

The archbishop stressed that message as will, presumably, any Vatican official who speaks about communications until next year’s message.

In Dhaka, the archbishop said, “The Catholic Church must be present in this digital world because the Holy Father inspires us to use modern media and communications tools to fulfill the Church’s mission of proclamation.”

There are many reasons that the Catholic Church must be present in the world of digital communications but I had never before thought that papal inspiration might be one of them.

Aside from his novel rationale for living in the 21st century, however, Archbishop Celli fulfilled one of the chief duties of a communicator. He stayed “on message.”

But even though the message was good and the archbishop focused on proclaiming it, the talk was, according to people who were there, a failure.

Why was that?

There are three essential elements in communications: the message, the messenger and the audience.

The message is, of course, key. Granted, we all endure situations when a speaker has nothing to say but keeps talking anyway. However, the archbishop’s message in Dhaka was a valuable one and he single-mindedly proclaimed it.

The second element in communication is the messenger. One who hopes to communicate must have the rhetorical skills to do so but even more important is a willingness to be changed by the message. One cannot call others to change without oneself undergoing that same change. If the message cannot shape its proclaimer, it will not have an impact upon others, regardless of the messenger’s technical skills.

I do not know how many Facebook friends Archbishop Celli has but giving him the benefit of the doubt, let us assume that he has let his life be changed by his message.

The malleability of the messenger is not limited, however, to adapting to the message. Equally important is the audience. A messenger who cannot or will not recognize this fact and adapt to his audience is certain to fail.

That is what happened to Archbishop Celli in Dhaka.

According to someone who was present at the talk, all the young people who were in the audience afterwards said they did not understand what the archbishop was talking about.

Poverty, an irregular electricity supply and limited access to cyberspace in Bangladesh hamper involvement with the computer-based world of digital media. The presentation reportedly did not take these facts about the audience into account. So, a talk that might have been a successful presentation in Europe, and perhaps even has been, was a failure.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the Church’s ex officio guru for communications failed to take into account a key element of communications. However, the problem is not specific to the archbishop.

A major challenge to evangelization, the communication of the Good News, is our repeated and ongoing failure to take the Church’s audience into account.

We have a message, the best of all messages. We have communicators whose lives are shaped by that message. Yet, most of the people of Asia have no notion of our proclamation. And that is not the case in Asia alone, it is universal.

The problem lies in our failure to present the Good News as a real answer to bad news. We often present the Church and its Gospel as a “package deal.” “This is how it is, it is good for you, take it.”

But something that is perceived as an institution unrelated to the concerns and problems of real people in a real place is not going to be good news to them. If we do not present the Gospel in such a way that people see that it answers the bad news in their lives, they will ignore us.

Therefore, in addition to being shaped by the message of the Church, we must become expert in bad news. We must know what shape the bad news takes in various times, places and lives. Then, we must tailor our communication to answer that bad news. Only then does evangelization become the communication of the Good News as a hope-instilling, joy-producing answer to the “joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of the world’s people.

If we fail to preach the Good News as an answer to the world’s bad news, we fail as communicators, we fail as evangelizers, we fail as a Church.

Source: And now for the bad news… (UCAN)

Maryknoll Father William Grimm is the publisher of UCA News and former editor-in-chief of “Katorikku Shimbun,” Japan’s Catholic weekly

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