Here's a link to an article my friend Kevin Fraser sent me. I have been on the road and have just gotten around to reading it. It's about the media and the Catholic Ghetto. It's quite good. Some highlights ...
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The results of such efforts are, in Nicolosi’s words, “predictably amateur,” lacking either professional polish or, as in case of There Be Dragons, the basics of good storytelling. Much the same thing can be [said] of television, where there is little to no Catholic presence in prime time, and where cable television networks, such as EWTN, enjoy minimal viewership among both young Catholics and non-Catholics.
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"They want every film to be The Passion [of the Christ] and expect people to walk out of the theater converted,” Iocco told OSV. “But we’ve already had The Passion and the whole world hasn’t converted. Nor are they going to because of a film. That’s not what films do. A film is successful if it gets people to ask a question they might not have asked before.”
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To make the budget work, [Nicolosi] went on to explain, they hire people without the experience or the training to do the job — a move that Nicolosi characterizes as “simply crazy. You would never attempt to build a $20 million building and hire an architect who had never built a building. You would never go in for brain surgery and let someone operate on you who’d never performed surgery. But people think they can do that with movies,” she said.
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It was for that the reason that John Paul the Great Catholic University opened its doors in 2006. Focusing almost exclusively on communication arts and offering concentrations in fields such as screenwriting, producing, social media evangelization, animation, and gaming, the school is the first of its kind in the world of Catholic higher education.
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[My comment: in my opinion, the video projects that John Paul the Great University brags about and puts up on the internet illustrate the point of this article, but not in the way they intend to. They are a good first step, but they are a further example of what this article is about, and what I call the "Catholic Ghetto Mentality".]
Anyway, it's good to see Our Sunday Visitor do an article on this and focus attention on something we need to take seriously.
Comments
"I also am suspicious of Truth that has to be “packaged” and “sold” to this generation. The truth of the matter is that it’s not going to happen. Catholic media simply cannot compete on the level of secular or Protestant media anymore. We don’t have the resources or the culture that would accept a major motion picture that was favorable to the Church."
I think that, for some, this situation would lead to despair as far as influencing the visual arts are concerned. I wish I could say otherwise but sometimes I think they're right. If Our Lord won't send us those resources and in great abundance, then it seems all is lost and that we've been abandoned. And if we're not, then the impression of it remains.
Many thanks for your time and prayers in advance.