Fr. Z's Blog

I’m confident that pretty much all of us priests have at one point or another after a Mass heard something along this line, generally from one of our treasured senior mass-attending Catholic ladies:

“O Father, thank you for that message. I didn’t understand all of it, but I could hear every word.”

Which brings us to the role of that two-edged sword, the microphone.

I saw a series of tweets (x’s?) today which brought up the installation of a new sound system in cavernous St. Peter’s Basilica, where the human voice had no chance alone to fill the space.

The system was used for the first time on July 23 for a Mass for the World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, replacing an audio system in the basilica that had been installed almost a quarter-century ago for the Great Jubilee of 2000.https://t.co/zwVwrMBHem

— Crux (@Crux) August 12, 2023

St. Peter’s is a special situation. But there are large old churches in the world. Solutions had to be found for preaching, given that the human voice is only so strong. In those churches you will sometimes see a pulpit, raised and reachable by stairs, half way down the nave to bring down the distance between the preacher and the majority present. Pulpits were raised not only so the preacher could be seen, but more importantly more easily heard.

Moreover, once upon a time priests received training in oratory.

On a personal note, I recall one Christmas Midnight Mass at my home parish in Minnesota, a very large church jammed with sound-dampening people in winter clothes. During the announcements before the sermon the sound system went out and couldn’t be recovered. Having been in theatre for years and being equipped by God and training with a big voice, I stuck my heels into the the floorboards and let’er rip. It was perhaps the most exhilarating experience of preaching I’ve ever had, in that context, in that moment. It was raw and unmediated. I was allowed to give everything to it. I heard from people for a long time about that one. It was as the architecture was intended before any electronic go-between. I was heard clearly – by those who had decent hearing of course – all the way to the back of the choir loft in that massive space, without a microphone.   Not all priests can do that, but many could with some voice training and a good ear to hear yourself in your space as you project.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote an essay about the debilitating effect the introduction of the microphone had on Catholic identity. His well-known tag: “The medium is the message.” The idea is this. Your message, which intuitively is what some little old ladies will call a sermon, is the content which you want people to grasp for the classical effects of moving, persuading, etc. The medium, which conveys the content, also has it’s own subtle indirect content. After the introduction of the Novus Ordo, McLuhan wrote that the introduction of the microphone into every aspect of the Mass to make everything more immediate and accessible (I would say “intrusion”) was the proximate cause of the decline of Latin sacred worship and Mass versus populum (both of which had been slithering in for sometime during the 20th c. Liturgical Movement). Hearing everything lead to seeing everything. The medium (intermediary) of the mic eliminated the effort needed to hear, pay close attention, use a hand-missal with the prayers, etc.

The microphone not only makes the preachers voice artificial, but it changes the amount of effort the preacher has to fill the space and project his “message”. Also, it takes the aural focus someplace else. Father is “up there” but his “voice” is coming from “over there”. A subtle message from the medium is that “places” in church don’t matter. And there is something disproportioned about having a large space, which you know is a large space, and nevertheless hearing the preacher clearly even though he is speaking in a natural conversational level of voice as if you were sitting only a few feet away. There is a break with reality. Father is somehow disembodied in a moment when that which is incarnational and sacramentally mediated is fundamental. Moreover, in making everything immediately accessible, you eliminate the clefts in the apophatic rocks through which people strive for that glimpse of transforming mystery.

In addition, the microphone, in massively reducing the lack of effort the preacher must put into projecting his message to the back of the church, also reduces the obligation to put his whole self into it, thus reducing the subtle message in the medium about the conviction of the one preaching.

The priest’s own energy has its own knock on force on those present. It has always been so. Reading a famous live speech and hearing a recording of a famous live speech and seeing a video of a famous speech and being present when it is being delivered are all different ways of experiencing the message, both in what was on the pages, in the speakers mind and heart, and what came from the context.

Finally, the microphone also permits and amplifies the tendency of some to speak in a prissy “priest voice”, imbued either with self-conscious piety or seriously self-centered effeminacy.  Again, the medium is the message: if the medium (style of delivery) is cloying… if the medium sounds effeminate….

Microphones.  I am not against microphones across the board.  It depends on the context and the moment.  But let us understand what is being lost when the medium has its own content.