Spectacle v. mystery
by Msgr. Charles Pope, May 30, 2025
"Pope Leo XIV made some very cogent observations back in 2012 that summon us to be honest about a culture in disrepair. He also set forth a unique vision that the Church must recover if we are to effectively evangelize and remain true to what we have received.
"Let's look briefly at his description of the disrepair -- the poisonous anti-culture that dominates our times -- and then set our sights on his vision of an antidote.
"The pope, then Father Robert Prevost, prior general of the Order of St. Augustine, was addressing the Synod of Bishops, who had gathered to discuss the new evangelization. He said:
"Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel -- for example, abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia. The sympathy is so ingrained that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.
" ... Moreover, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, Church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum (the world), and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery."
Isn't mystery what Miracles on video is about?
Things that defy physics or biology?
Is the real "mystery" about how such miracles occurred. rather than whether they occurred?
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