3 August 2009: "Is ‘The Pope’ the next relevant buzz band?"

This post is about Vatican II. A mirthful Carles has playful fun at the Roman Cathlic Church's expense, gently mocking its efforts to recapture some of the market share, as it were, it has lost in the field of Christianity. Of course, compromises that embrace commercial methods seem to undermine the spiritual message of the Church. "Feel kinda afraid that the Catholic Church will ‘try 2 hard’ 2 sell records, and the church will turn into a ‘business’ instead of a place of worshiping the Lord." This invites satiric diatribes such as this, that rhetorically equate faith with enthusiasm for a pop-cultural trend: "The Popes will had ‘mad passion’ about God, and appeal to people who are ‘hella down’ with being Catholic + miscellaneous Christian themes." Marketing efforts for the Church symbolically reduce the transcendence of its message, meaning the Pope, in the marketplace of ideas, has become the equivalent of

* Feist
* Will Smith
* Eminem
* Fergie
* Black Eyed Peas
* Gwen Stefani
* Enrique Iglesias
* Jimmy Eat Worlds
* The Gaga Ladies
* Limp Bizkit
* Nelly Furtada
* Papa Roach
* Pussie Cat Dolls
* u2
* =w=
* Yeah Yes Yeas

This changes the evaluative criteria for spiritual tenets to those that govern cultural ephemera. While this brings the religion in line with the prevailing modes of verification in a consumer society, it threatens to trivialize the metaphysical postulates and make them into the equivalent of taglines or slogans. It some ways, this heralds a return to the pre-Reformation era, where the selling of papal indulgences -- the pop songs of their era? -- firmly planted the Catholic church in the commercial business nexus. Updating eternal truths to make them more palatable for a secular age is always conceptually dubious, as the mixed results of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church's most recent effort to modernize, convincingly demonstrate. Was the council merely an alibi for a recommercialization of the Church? Is modern piety so thoroughly infused with the discourse of consumerism that such a transformation is well-nigh inevitable?

The underlying question Carles is posing is whether spiritual concepts can be transmitted as memes, via the conduits of pop cultural diffusion, or whether the medium becomes the spiritual message -- transforming the Church's message of redemption to a very different sort of axiology: that one should always endeavor to participate in the zeitgeist. Of course, this strategy did work quite well for the Church in the Middle Ages, but it had a tight grip over the nascent media forms and modes of entertainment in that epoch.

But perhaps more relevant to Carles's readers is the T.S. Eliot-like injunction to reinvigorate culture with a return to Catholic traditions: "Just yearning for ‘more’ out of music," he remarks, confessing the arid emptiness of what is currently offered as spiritual nourishment, and implying that a fractured church cannot not rise to the challenge posed by an ever more vulgarizing secular world. This Tractarian theme in a philosopher who is typically inclined to ecumenism if not outright agnosticism is surprising.

Carles, in his final comment, in which he anticipates a "remix" of the one true faith by some unknown person or entity (the blank space he leaves is pregnant and poetic, the Word posited as a vacuum and a graphological sign) sends a similarly mixed message. "Will yall buy an mp3 by the Pope, or will u wait til he is remixed by __________?" Is he rejecting all of Vatican II as being as superfluous and trivial as a DJ remix, or is he positing an eschatological invigoration of the Word, in a possible imminent Second Coming, which will take the form of the Pope being corrected spiritually by a higher power? Should we wait to embrace a Catholicism that may be subject to revision? Or do we "buy in" to the Pope as he speaks now? Interesting that Carles would seek to supplant the deist notion of God as the great watchmaker with a vision of God as the ultimate DJ.