Visual Imagery in the Catholic Church: Medieval to Modern

Introduction

Located in the rural farmland hills fifty miles southwest of Paris, France, is the small village of Chartres. Visitors often arrive by the short train ride from Paris, having planned an easy day trip with a few hours of sightseeing and a mid-day break for lunch, returning to the lights of Paris in time for dinner. Strolling through Chartres, they turn a corner among the town’s narrow lanes and tightly packed buildings into the town square. Suddenly the cathedral’s twin bell towers and gothic façade soar above. Eyes peering upward, the stone massif takes up the whole expanse of their view and seemingly touches the sky. This UNESCO World Heritage Site, built from 1194-1220, is considered one of the finest examples of French gothic architecture, exemplified by its interior that glows from colored light piercing through 167 stained-glass windows. The tourist may pick up a pamphlet to read about their significance, or sign up for a guided tour by one of the official art historians. The windows are more than a bucket list and a post to social media, however. They are artifacts of important Medieval ritual communication at a time when the Church needed such visual imagery to help maintain its tenuous hold on a changing society.

Over 800 years later, these windows are symbols of artistic mastery, but their purpose within the Catholic Church has been replaced by visual imagery spun by the World Wide Web. The Church has sustained its flock into the 21st century by adapting to the Digital Age with new forms of ritual communication such as scrolling through websites displaying photos and videos of news and prayers, or live streaming sermons. Additionally, the Church in both periods has relied on visual imagery in an attempt to regain control of its congregation as the tide of the secular world laps at the threshold of church doors.

History of Visual Imagery

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church incorporated Roman conventions rich in sensory and material practices to represent its own display of rituals and religious symbolism. Even in the 6th century, Pope Gregory I revised Christian beliefs by encouraging art and imagery to be held as sacred, “It is one thing to adore a picture, another to learn from the history of the picture what is to be adored. For what scripture shows to those who read, a picture shows to the illiterate people as they see it; because in it the ignorant see what they ought to imitate, they who do not know letters can read it.” Into the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church continued to evoke such grand displays of art, sculpture, and architecture as honoring God. The more conservative Orthodox or Protestant views, however, resented the Catholics’ grand displays and artistic symbolism. They believed that icons such as Jesus were not works of art, but were windows of the sacred that should follow ridged rules of clothes, poses, and facial expressions. They believed that Catholic artwork and imagery distracted from the message and glory of God.

The Catholic Church spun their justification for elaborate artwork and imagery by associating them with the allegorical gold and silver of God from the Old Testament. Their artistic efforts would be a means to recreate paradise on earth; the more elaborate and inspiring, the more invoking the beauty of Heaven and magnitude of God. This decree, combined with increased trade prosperity and monarchy wealth within what is termed the Great Paris Basin, launched the surge of gothic cathedral construction from the 12th to 15th centuries. Not only was the cathedral seen as a grand vessel of God, but in the centuries that it took to build one, multiple generations of families who worked on its construction could hold it as a testament to their devotion to God.

As the engineering of the gothic cathedral’s expanse grew upward and outward, the designers were able to bring in more light from windows. The popularity of stained-glass windows and their imagery became an integral part of the church’s symbolism and rituals, serving as both decoration and education to whole populations regardless of social class. A thousand villagers would crowd into the cathedral each Sunday for the priest’s sermon and, in place of the written word, look to the windows as he told a story from the scripture. Below the panes of glass, he would lecture them on the importance of faith and devotion in an increasingly secular world using a combination of imagery, prayer, and song.

The layout of the cathedral positioned the priest at the front, turned away from the parishioners as an act of leading them towards God. His words, however, were often lost in the high ceilings and long nave full of listeners and squirming children. To compensate yet fulfill their need to worship, those in the back would often sit nearest the windows they favored, such as a revered saint, saying their prayers within the small space of their confined area within the church. By the end of the hours-long sermon, the parishioners would have been at the same service, but left with different interpretations depending on where they stood in the cathedral and which stained glass windows they preferred to adore.

Chartres Stained Glass Imagery

The building of Chartres Cathedral coincided with the Medieval period when commoners learned Catholic virtues through art and storytelling. The opportunity to bring to life biblical stories through the windows highlighted “the rapidly changing world of northern France in the 13th century, a world of growing urbanization and division between city and countryside.” The region’s churches were struggling to maintain their economic status and spiritual authority against other emerging practices such as the mendicant Franciscans. These spiritually enlightened, but impoverished friars gave their followers the ideal path to maintain Catholic devotion to God without requiring the lavish taxation to fund a grand, expensive new cathedral. Unique to the stained-glass panels in Chartres was the first time that tradesmen were depicted in windows along with the revered saints and biblical figures. At least twenty-five different occupations were represented in bottom panels to represent the commerce and prosperity of the town. The windows showed both the growing secularization and the church’s attempt to welcome the townspeople back to their sacred  world by making the stained-glass a “social space” to include their work. By developing the social and religious imagery within the colored glass, the clergy were able to include stories of the growing congregation that included merchants, laborers, students, commoners, and pilgrims.

An example of how the Church at Chartres sought to bring back order to the city was by representing the story of Prodigal Son in one of its stained-glass panels, using it as a metaphor of the most common theme at the time, the journey of life. Briefly, the story depicts a restless son who leaves his family with a portion of his father’s wealth and journeys to the city, only to be seduced by the city’s secular extravagances and lose all his money. Destitute and believing his father would never take him back, the son finds work tending pigs who eat and are cared for better than himself. Unable to live with himself any longer, he humbly returns home to his father who opens his arms with joy, dressing him in robes and preparing a celebratory meal of a fattened calf. The son should have never feared returning home; his father’s love was unconditional and eternal. The story is a parable of rebirth, of being lost and then found, of being welcomed back into the boundless love of God and gaining not material, but spiritual wealth. The thirty Chartres panels constructing the Prodigal Son were an opportunity for the commoner to gaze and participate in a “narrative of penance.” It reflects the attempt of the church to bring its parishioners back to the church. The story emphasized that the church saw the growing city as “sites of deception and corruption and to contend that only through penitence and renunciation could one achieve salvation.” Within the church, the townspeople could leave the city’s “places of spiritual exile and death” and find “spiritual rebirth.”

The Church Transitions into the Digital Age

Since Galileo’s trial in the 17th century, the Catholic Church has acquired a reputation for bristling against science and technology. In reality, however, the Catholic Church has been at the front of identifying and adopting these new trends as tools for God. Dr. Maureen O’Brien of Duquesne University concurs, noting that the Catholic Church was not reluctant to embrace technology. They saw it as another gift to send the message of God. The Catholic Church’s transition into the Digital Age can be traced to the advent of electricity and photography in the 1800s. Together they beget a wave of new technology that improved communications and the transmission of religious messages among all classes of society in cities and countryside: electrical lighting, the telegraph, the telephone, motion pictures, radio, and television. The marvels of these new technologies were seen as equivalent improvements and influences to religious messaging as were the acts of writing and printing books. They united communities and families in the ever-sprawling nations by means of new religious rituals of communication that shared God’s message.

Pope John Paul II, who led the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005, was instrumental in ushering it into the Digital Age, encouraging use of the Internet to further its mission, and making it a mainstream staple to millions of Catholics. His leadership and enthusiasm made him the church’s first media star. At the 1990 World Communication Day he said, “In the new computer culture, the Church can more readily inform the world of her beliefs and explain the reasons for her stance on any given issue or event. She can hear more clearly the voice of public opinion, and enter into a continuous discussion with the world around her, thus involving herself more immediately in the common search for solutions to humanity’s many pressing problems.”

Ironically, it was Pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005 that vaulted the Vatican into the world of multimedia and live steaming video. The Mass of Requiem at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City was the first to be televised live in almost every country, with an estimated viewership of over two billion people despite the church claiming only 1.3 billion members. At the time, it was considered the most-watched live event in history. Since then, the Vatican has curated a multimedia domain with the official Vatican News website launched in 1995, Vatican Television Center to spread the gospel using multimedia, and recording the Pope’s daily activities and ministries. On top of the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, being in circulation over 150 years, and Vatican Radio for over eighty years, they are active on all social media channels and even smartphone apps. This Digital Age is a continuation of the Church’s continued adoption of media and imagery to serve and celebrate God.

Despite the pattern of actions and edicts that the Catholic Church leaders have presented, as one digs further there still seem to be differences in opinion on the position of the Church and digital media. Some authors in the literature ask whether the Church is leveraging the technology to its full advantage and if it has led to further deinstitutionalization. At the International Conference of Bishops in 2009, concerns were raised about the lack of funding for congregations and seminary programs to have a communications program despite orders from Rome, stating that these kinds of programs are the first to be cut. Pierce describes a common theme that when a tech-savvy layperson oversees a parish’s digital media program, they are essentially given control of the Church’s messaging. This introduces tension with the clergy, “blurring the lines of power between professional and lay member.” Another point is that the interactive nature of websites “creates upheaval for religious publishers and leaders trying to maintain one over-arching metanarrative.” Although there is consensus that the church has adapted to new media over the centuries, this is another example where the church’s authority is being threatened by the loss of control in a secular world. The Church finds itself stumbling with its footing in previously established roles and traditions, grappling to ensure its relevance. This unevenness can be seen in examples of how the Church communicates through its websites and visual imagery.

Current Catholic Church Examples

Reviews of current Catholic Church leadership websites find that they display little in the way of visual imagery. They are mostly text heavy, emphasizing calendars of community events, weekly or daily news items, and church leadership. The official Vatican Holy See website appears dated without use of photos or video. It is a portal heavy on text and links with an emphasis on Church leadership and lacking any imagery of religious symbolism other than a few images of a cross and dove.30 Any photos and videos are linked to or embedded from their official Vatican News website, which does have a newer layout with more use of photos and videos to augment their daily news stories and cultural features. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops website acts as the official Catholic Church in the United States, but lacks any sophisticated media or imagery, instead communicating current events, news, opinions, and even promoting merchandise.30 This pattern of websites laden with text without visual communication is carried out throughout smaller, regional parish websites.

An example comparing new and old depictions of saints in visual imagery is a section of the Vatican News website called “Saint of the Day.” This representation is quite counter to how a saint was projected in stained glass centuries ago when the faithful would linger for hours praying for guidance and protection. Here, the user finds a small photo banner of undisclosed saints and around fifty words describing today’s special saint. Occasionally there is a small thumbnail image of the saint, but there is no description of the artwork or attempt to tie the saint and his relevance in the historic image. The reader can skim down the webpage, but there is no reason to linger or show reverence. Smartphone apps with calendars of saints are also similar, with a few words of text and perhaps a small photo, but they act more as a reference than source of prayer.

In contrast to these less-than-visually stimulating websites is a trend among independent Catholic faith websites, such as U.S. Catholic Magazine, that emphasize digital media rich in modern visual imagery as one might find on popular mainstream websites. This particular site serves well in attracting a younger audience used to seeing themselves reflected in the chosen visual imagery while simultaneously delivering the messages of the Catholic faith. Its stories are contemporary and feature current societal issues and lifestyle practices for the modern Catholic. The use of visual imagery ranges from photos of the Pope to children, from softly burning candles to workout routines. Another well-developed multimedia website is the independent news agency, Rome Reports, that covers the Pope and the Vatican using professionally produced, short news videos, weekly reports, and documentaries that are broadcast in several countries with an audience of fifty million. Their premium cable channel and smartphone apps allow access to additional video stories and content.

Conclusion

Stories crafted in colorful glass and inset under the high vaulted ceilings of gothic cathedrals were integral to the Catholic ritual of understanding faith, practicing devotion, and giving the clergy control in a changing society. Today, literacy is commonplace around the world. Catholics obtain their guidance with their own books or following along with a sermon amplified by microphones and speakers at mass on Sundays. As Pope John Paul II proselytized 30 years ago, the Internet has allowed the Church unprecedented communication of their message and Catholics to maintain their faith 24/7. Unlike the Medieval period, however, modern digital imagery is not an integral ritual of quiet prayer or supplementing the sermon.

The Vatican has adopted the Internet as a means of transmission communication, to continuously communicate with its flock, but it’s untold how much this is actually influencing followers. The Church is facing a similar threat of deinstitutionalization as in the Medieval ages with secular noise drowning out thoughts of faith. Using the available tools at hand, they are trying to bring their own prodigal sons and daughters back as they are tempted by more secular activities. Still, several questions remain about the Church’s efforts that could be part of future research:

1.   Do Catholics see themselves in these digital media?

2.   Are websites and digital technology the best representations of the Church’s rituals and religious symbolism in the Digital Age? Are they, in fact, honoring God?

3.   Is plugging into the Internet essential to devotion or are followers better connected in quiet reflection among meaningful artwork as they were centuries ago?

4.   Is there a purpose to current visual imagery that is more than supplementing or communicating news?

Horsfield suggests at the end of his book that the Church has always adapted well to new media by experimenting with new methods of traditional practices. The use of social media channels, for example, provides a parish with new ways to communicate with their congregation, but each parish has been forced to adapt to what its congregation values, not the other way around. He sees the future of the Church as a constant digital media evolution that most importantly incorporates broader cultural values – even secular ones - to create new relevancy. Pierce uses the metaphor, “…Christianity seems like our grandparents’ Buick. Christianity needs to contextualize instead of institutionalize if it is to continue to thrive as it has throughout the centuries.”

There has been and will always be push and pull between the secular and spiritual world as societies are introduced to new technologies and commercial influences that lead to social unrest. Catholic Church leadership continues to support and develop tools to evolve and embrace younger generations, such as smartphone apps Bluetoothed to a digital Rosary. However, it has been suggested that the Church needs to invest in better digital communication with their websites to encourage consistent messaging of their faith. A formal study of how Catholics practice their faith in the Digital Age would give Church leaders guidance on moving forward the next 25 years.

Finally, one has to wonder what will happen with the legacy of the Digital Age and what will be preserved. Religious artwork from a thousand years ago still inspires hope and devotion from the tourists and pilgrims who wait in museum line queues. Does the weight of the Church’s message lie in the legacy of its art and imagery and how they are used as rituals and symbolism? As parish churches close and congregation numbers lapse what will inspire that devotion? Will the 21st century Church have as comparable a legacy of its faith as the stained-glass windows of Chartres still provide 800 years later?

Citations and Notes

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