Video Screens in Church - what do you make of this?

[mcb]

Here's an announcement from this week's newsletter in a parish (and diocese) I used to live in, and still visit several times a year. Since I'm not a parishioner, I don't feel entitled to take part in the consultation, though the urge is strong! What would you make of it if you lived in this parish?
____________________________

What do you think?

After Easter last year we introduced a computerised way of accompanying the singing in church. This was to help our hard pressed organists, and to make sure we had hymns when they were not available. After a few teething problems, this is now working fine and is generally well received.

The Parish Council has agreed to carrying out consultation on this further scheme. The scheme is as follows:

Many of the hymn books in the church are becoming dog-eared and may soon have to be replaced, at a cost of about £1300. This situation gives us an opportunity to explore other means of displaying the hymns, and also to present enhanced ways of worship. The proposal is to mount three 50" plasma monitors on the two pillars situated at the foot of the altar steps, one monitor on each pillar for the main congregation, and the other monitor on the right pillar at the front of the Blessed Sacrament aisle. The monitors will be mounted at about 8ft high and connected and driven by the computer in the organ loft. With these monitors we can display any special notices for the week, details of the Mass, the appropriate place in your missal, the readings, the responses for the Mass, the hymns and even appropriate pictures can be shown before Mass and if relevant during the homily.

The Parish Council would like to have yout thoughts on these proposals before proceeding, so please pass on any comments to Fr Ϛӟգخฤဎ before Ash Wednesday.

[lesley wright]

Having on odd occasions worshipped in a church with video-hymns, readings and notices (though not illustrations for the homily!) I could see the attraction, since I've yet to find a hymn book which contains everything I'd like to use. But the copyright implications are huge, and it really does need someone who is Grade A* at preparing the presentation each week - and if it's a parish with several Masses, each with its own musicians and choice of hymns etc. it becomes a huge task. In my parish we struggled to find three people willing to be on a rota to prepare the weekly bulletins for the people to take home, we'd have no hope of introducing this level of technology.
Lesley

[docmattc]

I'm not against using this technology per se to provide texts for singing. We used it at university to great effect and last time I was in St George's cathedral Southwark there were flat screens on every pillar.

However, there are lots of things in that newsletter item which make me very uncomfortable. They appear to be using a karaoke machine for a start, and the proposals for the screens suggest they may well be more of a distraction than a help.

All the things that Lesley mentions are issues too, but they are practical problems which could be overcome with lots of effort.

[Reginald]

A screen is used in the Methodist Church at which I play and it bothers me not one jot - not least because they helpfully put the copyright details at the end of the last verse and I regularly mis-count verses! In a Catholic church I think screens would need to be very carefully placed so as not to act as a fourth focal point for the Mass - but then, potentially, shuffling backwards and forwards through a hymn book is equally as distracting.

[contrabordun]

Presumably it might have a beneficial effect on the singing: looking forwards and slightly upwards to read a screen places the head, mouth and neck in a perfect position for singing, instead of having the chin buried in chest to read the hymnbook!

[MaryR]

I've been trying to imagine our church with plasma screens placed at strategic points and I'm afraid I should hate it! For start, it certainly wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing. They are talking about 50" screens; that's over 4 feet! I worship in a relatively modern church, but it is beautiful. Great big screens, mounted in prominent positions, would mar its beauty. That must be so for other churches. The screens at Southwark that docmattc mentions are smaller as you can see here. Even so, I think they spoil the beautiful lines of the pillars.

I also think there's a danger that the focus of the congretation will move from the Sanctuary area to the screens. People are drawn to looking at screens, even if nothing's going on! I'm not a fan of helpful images during homilies. I'd rather close my eyes and use my imagination. That's not to say that there isn't some beautiful art around that might be an excellent focal point for a reflection; I just don't want it during Mass.

I especially hate the idea that the screens might be used as a sort of electronic noticeboard.

I take the point about making it easier for choirs to broaden the repertoire of a parish by using songs that may not be in the parish hymn books but, speaking as someone who prepares a word/music sheet for our parish each week, I have to say that the task is not that onerous.

If this were a proposal in my parish, I would be leading the campaign against it!

[Southern Comfort]

Screens for the projection of the words of hymns (using carousels of slides ─ these days, we'd use PowerPoint or similar) were widely used in the US in the early 1970s. Their use there had virtually died out by the early 80s, except in Newman Centers (which are university campus ministry chapels), where they still persist. The reason for their dying-out was simple: people came to recognise that implanting a huge visual symbol (or more than one, if multiple screens) in the midst of the assembly was taking all the focus away from the real major symbols of the liturgy, as already mentioned by Reginald: chair, ambo, altar (and font). The screen was so much bigger than any of those, and yes, size matters.

I agree that screens can make people lift their heads out of hymnbooks, with consequential benefits to the singing and increased flexibility over what is sung, and that there are 'green' factors to do with saving paper, but perhaps the over-dominant visual symbol is too much of a price to pay and the inevitable glitches can also be irritating. I also wonder if the fact that someone else is flipping from one piece of sung text to another actually feels like domination by another person, in a way that looking at a hymnal or mass leaflet or order of service isn't. With the former, someone else decides what you can read/sing, and when; with the latter, you can participate in your own way, and still have the text available to mull over if you want to.

And once you have the screens, there's no limit to what you can project on them. I think there's a justifiable case for playing a DVD of the Bishop proclaiming his pastoral letter (I've seen that a number of times on the other side of the Atlantic), but the problems start to arise when you begin to install CCTV cameras to broadcast the entire liturgy to those in the farther reaches of the church, or even in the hall next door as happens every Sunday in one West London parish.

Here's a comment on that side of question, in the midst of an article on the need to be physically present to liturgy, and on televised masses, by Gabe Huck (Pastoral Music, June-July 1998):

If, by chance, you were to wander into St Patrick's Cathedral in the Archdiocese of New York, what would you see? A long gothic building, of course, focused on a distant sanctuary. But you might also notice the large television monitors hanging from every pillar, provided so that during major celebrations everyone can see what's happening up there in that distant sanctuary. The people who have provided this service have pretty much guaranteed that nothing will, in fact, be happening, because they have turned the doers of the liturgy into viewers of a ceremony. Those television monitors are a denial of the statement that opens the General Instruction of the Roman Missal: "The celebration of the Mass is the action of Christ and the people of God hierarchically assembled" (para 1); they also stand against the statement in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (para 1144) that it is "the whole assembly that is leitourgos."

It isn't ideal to be far away from the ambo or the table at Mass, of course, but it's all right when the assembly is large. When, however, you televise the lector at the ambo or the priest at the table to those at a distance (but, as at St Patrick's, still in the same room!), what does this practice say about the whole enterprise of doing liturgy? Amongst other things, it says: 'Who needs you?' It says: 'Welcome to the audience. We'll try to make your visit to St Patrick's as pleasant as possible.' Those monitors hanging on the pillars of that cathedral are perhaps the ugliest thing ever done to a house of the church... and that's saying a lot! The shape and size of the ego behind this decision boggles the mind.

In other words, Huck is fulminating against those who deny the fact that it's the whole assembly who in a very real sense are the concelebrants (yes, I know Redemptionis Sacramentum said we shouldn't talk about it in these terms, but other documents confirm this view, not least the Catechism itself) and that in fact the action is or should be happening ─ in the nave ! Yes, it's led by those in the sanctuary, but we're all supposed to be actively engaged in what is going on, not just watching it.

There are obvious pastoral exceptions to this, such as the broadcasting of Mass either by live streaming or podcast to the sick and housebound, who otherwise would not be able to be part of the celebrating community. But otherwise, Huck has a point, and one that we should take seriously.

It seems to me that screens for hymn-numbers, or hymn texts, or whatever else, are the thin end of a wedge that maybe we should be avoiding. We need to use them with extreme care and extreme rarity, lest they take over our liturgical 'enterprise'. Yes, they can bring the readings at the Easter Vigil to life in a special way with stunning images, but using multimedia stuff every Sunday soon becomes a gimmick, a game, or just palls.

I would advise anyone using screens of any kind for liturgy to think long and hard about whether to install them, and then long and hard again about whether and how often to use them.

[docmattc]

that's over 4 feet!

Don't forget that TV screens are measured on the diagonal, a quick bit of trigonometry (and looking up the aspect ratio) gives a screen size of 3 foot 7 by 2 feet.
I tend to agree with Mary that they could easily look out of place in many a church. My experience was of Mass in a hall of residence conference room. There was a large white wall behind the table on which hymn words were projected. When we weren't singing, the wall returned to being a wall.

[Sonoqui]

If this were a proposal in my parish, I would be leading the campaign against it!

And, as a fellow parishioner, I'd volunteer to be your campaign manager!

[gwyn]

Urgh!