Op-Ed - Larry Montalli & Rick Sikorski

If I Were the Catholic Media Czar
Here's how to evangelize every couch potato and talk-radio junkie in America.

By Lawrence Montalli, Jr.

Most everybody who met up in Denver in August '93 with John Paul II and a few hundred thousand other faithful Catholics still remembers the gathering with unusual clarity. You don't quickly forget the sensation of being in the midst of what was, for a few magical days, a virtual Catholic culture. One of my strongest memories is of a 20-something guy in cutoffs and sunglasses, wearing a "Life is Short, Pray Hard" tee-shirt. On the 15-mile hike to the Mass site, I watched the guy I now think of as "Sound-byte Man" chase down reporter/camera man teams like a hound after rabbits. There were lots of them wandering through the crowds in search of quotable quotes, trying to get a handle on the meaning of this Catholic festival of faith.
Sound-byte Man was a one-man spin-doctoring team, diligently working to shape the stories the TV journalists were stitching together for the evening news. Whenever he spotted a news team, he'd race ahead of the 20 teenagers he was leading. The TV guys would be surprised at his brazen approach, but usually they'd say "sure" when he offered them a "byte."
Then this Catholic hipster with three days of stubble, a walking stick, and a bandanna tied on his head would turn the reporters' predictable questions about a married priesthood, condoms, and the "rigid" pope into opportunities to express the sensibility of orthodox Catholic thinking. His sharp answers made the age-old attraction of the Church perfectly understandable, and they were delivered in digestible bite-sized nuggets. Sound-byte Man was a shrewd student of the media. With and without words he sent one clear message that day: The Catholic Faith is fresh and vibrant and relevant as ever in the 90s. He knew the media is a powerful evangelization tool if you know how to use it.
The problem is, too few are using the media - or are not using it well - for this purpose.
As Catholic "Media Czar," my first order of business would be to create an institute where people would go to learn what Sound-byte Man so clearly understood and what many Catholic leaders, lay and clergy, still don't understand. The Catholic Media Institute would be staffed by top professionals from all areas of electronic and print communications - television, radio, film, advertising, public relations, graphic design, etc. - folks who are at least as committed to the Catholic Faith as they are to dazzling on the air waves, on billboards, and in the pages of magazines.
Students at the Institute would be taught to use images and ideas to move the hearts and minds of contemporary men and women, a skeptical, but hungry, audience. They'd learn to effectively and honestly answer criticisms of the Church and her teachings and never to be defensive or sheepish about Catholic teachings. The Institute could be the first step in a new era of Catholic communications. A speakers' bureau, drawn from its professors and graduates, could be started from which the producers of news and opinion programs could book articulate, media-savvy experts to represent the Church's view on any topic. Writers would produce compelling editorials and essays for secular and religious publications. Dioceses could enlist the talents of graduates with sharp copy writing and graphic skills to promote programs with the flair now seen almost exclusively in the secular world. Better still, those programs would feature presenters who not only knew their subject, but had learned from the Institute how to share it. The possibilities go on.
The Institute wouldn't only prepare those dedicated full-time to communications. Bishops, priests, diocesan employees, and other laymen and women likely to come into contact with the media would also be urged to attend. The Institute wouldn't teach the substance of the message - there are already several fine organizations that do that well - it would concentrate on how to package and present that message and themselves.
All of this really does matter. Just ask the pundits who have pontificated about the media, the message, and the messengers since JFK's defeat of Nixon in 1960. That election came down, they say, to the images of each beamed by camera into the living rooms of millions of TV viewers. Kennedy, shining, robust, youthful, forthright. Nixon, tired, shifty-eyed, defensive, whipped.
A more contemporary example of playing the media game well is, of course, our own Sound-byte Man. I'm not arguing that all Church spokesmen should cultivate the neo-grunge look, but it's instructive to analyze Sound-byte Man's appeal. And what was it? Equal parts image, delivery, and message. He wasn't your stereotypical defender of the Faith. He had a bandanna and cutoffs where many expect bad hair and a polyester suit. He was upbeat, articulate, and plainspoken, not dour, churchy, or highbrow. His message wasn't new - in fact it was 2,000 years old - but it was tailored for the 90s.
Thinking back on Denver's World Youth Day 93, I wonder what he's up to. Probably out there somewhere, serving up appetizing bytes of faith for the masses.
Larry Montalli is associate editor of the National Catholic Register.

By Rick Sikorski

I'll never forget Sunday nights at dzia dzia's (grandfather's) house. No matter what the occasion or who might be visiting, the patriarch of our Polish Catholic family gathered the entire brood to watch Bishop Sheen on prime-time network TV. We little Catholics watched in awe as the adults hung on Bishop Sheen's every word and nodded in quiet approval when he hit a chord with one of his many powerful stories. It wasn't unusual for our grammar school class to discuss the previous night's show in next morning's religion class.
For those too young to remember, these were real-life scenes. A positive, dynamic, powerful Catholic presence on prime-time network TV was not a pipe dream - It was a reality.
Today the reality is quite different.
I live in Southern California, the second largest TV market in North America. There is no Bishop Sheen on prime-time TV, no Perry Como singing "Ave Maria" on The Kraft Music Hall. Catholic broadcast TV, such as it is, has been relegated to throwaway time slots to fill public service obligations. On cable, Catholic programming shares space with that of Protestant, Mormon, and other groups on part-time interfaith networks. Catholic radio is virtually nonexistent, except for a comparatively tiny presence on short-wave or inconvenient weekend slots on low-rated Protestant FM and AM stations.
Yet our Mormon friends run a barrage of positive-image advertising on prime-time broadcast and cable TV. (They were the first religious group to orbit their own communication satellite.) Fundamentalists across the country air local and syndicated "Bible Answerman" type radio shows throughout the day, many during drive time's peak listening hours. The so-called "faith teachers" broadcast 24 hours a day from the Trinity Broadcast Network. "Ecumenical Funda-mentalist" Jack Van Impe peddles his soft-core doomsday prophecies nationally on cable and network stations, broadcasting three times a week.
In comparison, prime-time coverage of the Catholic Church is routinely negative: the decline of the pope's health, declining vocations, sex scandals (real and imagined), dissension in the ranks of clergy, and apathy among the laity. And no matter how many zillions of petition signatures are gathered to get EWTN a berth in the local cable company's program roster, cable execs across the country routinely ignore these requests from their Catholic customers. They make plenty of space for pornography channels, while claiming blandly that they "just don't have any room" or "there just isn't enough customer interest" for Mother Angelica's Catholic network. You get the picture.
The Camelot days of prime-time Catholic TV are gone. But if I were the Catholic Media Czar, I'd change that - in a hurry.
Once an integral part of the most influential medium of the 20th century, the Catholic Church is now at the mercy of that medium, and it's not faring well. The Church needs to examine its business conscience, take charge of its own image, and get down to the business of evangelizing like a smart media marketing company.
Step one is the reclamation of TV. It's the most powerful information source in the world. It defines our perceptions of reality and influences our decisions. And its power to shape attitudes and actions will only increase as hundreds of new channels become available by satellite, as well as its inevitable marriage with the Internet.
The television is the most used appliance in American households. The average American watches between 4-6 hours a day, and for many, it's the source for news and information. It's the reason my four year-old says "McDonald's" when he means "hamburger" and "Pizza Hut" when he means "pizza."
To combat moral and ethical falsehoods and the often blatant anti-Catholic impressions that are promoted on TV, we need replacements for Bishop Sheen, "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's."
This is not an unrealistic goal. The buying power of the Catholic audience can be marketed to advertisers.
While Catholic programming is being developed, the Church needs to run a positive-image ad campaign. When? You guessed it: prime-time TV. Where? The five major networks. The Catholic Church needs to stand up for itself in the same arena it's being knocked down. It needs to define for the public what it is, why it's here, and why people need what it has -Christ. Chevron does this effectively with its "People Do" campaign, and all it's contributing to the salvation of souls is a tank of unleaded gasoline. McDonald's spends $200 million a year in advertising to promote hamburgers. That's less than a buck spent for each man, woman, and child in America.
McDonald's spends millions more on individual market media and every store contributes a minimum of 5% of its sales to fund this media effort.
The Catholic Church's message of Christ is infinitely more important than hamburgers.
If each Catholic in the U.S. pitched in one dollar, the price of a cheap hamburger, millions of dollars would be available to fund a serious effort to promote Catholic Truth through national TV and radio spots. Imagine the effect of a massive, effective advertising campaign on network TV promoting Christ and His Church. Once a national advertising campaign was established, the next move would be to work toward creating a chain of Catholic TV and radio stations, retail outlets, and the like. These would produce additional funds for the Church to carry out its pastoral and missionary work.
The benefits and positive effects on Catholic confidence and evangelization of a well-produced and authentically Catholic national advertising campaign would be incalculable. To use a business analogy, imagine for a moment that the Catholic Church is a large global company. The Vatican is the international headquarters, the pope is president and CEO, the Church in The United States is a division. Each bishop is a regional vice-president, each parish church a franchise outlet, each pastor the general manager of that outlet. This infrastructure is already in place.
The Catholic Church, like that international company, has it within its power to make proper and effective use of this infrastructure to deliver Christ's message to the world, to harness the power of the media for the service of the Truth.
This isn't pie-in-the-sky. This could be done - if enough of us Catholics simply willed it.

Rick Sikorski is the president of Good Catholic Information. E-mail him at sikorski@goodcathinfo.com.