“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”
Paweł Jarnicki
Part 3
But a casual reader may be surprised that McLuhan seems to suggest that the use of what he considers a “cold” microphone could “warm up” the Latin Mass (which he considers “cold”). What does it mean for media to be “cold” or “hot”?
In the simplest terms, a hot medium delivers information in “high definition”, in a form that minimizes the cognitive activity of the recipient. Take, for example, a contemporary entertainment film with surround sound and special effects. The recipient does not have to conjecture the details, does not have to imagine how something explodes, what someone is wearing, what a given interior looks like, what the background of a scene is, etc. (to stick to the realm of appearances). The recipient simply sees it, and is cognitively passive, because everything is “served on a plate.”
Cold media, on the other hand, provide information in “low definition”, in a form that requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient; in order to assimilate the message, the recipient must “warm it up”. Someone who reads a novel has to conjecture a lot, has to imagine what the scene described in words looks like, has to complete a lot of details, construe a lot, and can do it in many ways to a certain extent. [1] So, although on the surface, just like a movie viewer, they do nothing (they do not move or speak), we understand that a book reader is more active than a viewer who simply surrenders to impressions.
Hot media make the audience cognitively passive, while cold media force cognitive activity, which is why, among other things, “the medium is the message,” because in the long run it changes the level of knowledge of a larger group of recipients. Continuing with our book-film example, let us note that the knowledge of students who have watched the film adaptation of a school reading is different from the knowledge of students who have carefully read the book.
In this sense, the type of medium has a greater impact on culture and society than the content of the message being conveyed. Regardless of whether it is Pan Tadeusz [the Polish national epic] or another story, more is “gained” from the reception of a cold medium. This is because a cold medium requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient, an act that de facto creates a community.
After all, it is not state-issued ID cards or church baptism certificates that make us a community, but rather socialization into similar ways of “warming up” – completing, conjecturing, construing. If this seems too abstract, try to recall a social gathering. Jokes are often told at such gatherings, especially at the beginning, to build a shared mood. Jokes often involve some kind of understatement or mistake; the audience has to make a mental effort to “get it,” and shared laughter is proof that despite the ambiguity of the message, we “get it,” meaning we understand each other better and think alike. A momentary community is created. [2]
Another device that requires completion is... the parable. We usually think that their ambiguity served to ensure that only the chosen few understood them, so as not to cast pearls before swine, and we do not notice the other – or perhaps the first – side of the coin, that the ambiguity of certain statements, by forcing similar cognitive activity, builds a community.
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| Pius XII offering Mass at an altar with four microphones (only three visible). Photo courtesy of Nico Fassino |
McLuhan writes about the microphone, but he also seems to think of the Mass as a medium, although he does not make this distinction explicitly. [3] If the Mass is a medium, then the speaker is the Church, the listener is the people of God, and what is communicated through the Mass is the deposit of Faith. Viewing the Mass as a medium helps us understand why the “cold” microphone “warmed up” the Holy Mass, because in the new Mass – with sound amplification, in vernacular, with the priest facing the people – everything is to be “high definition”: visible, audible, and understandable.
The traditional Mass was “low definition” – cold (“demanding”), like reading a book: the faithful had to complete for themselves what the priest was doing. They had dogmas as their guideposts. The new Mass is hot (“easy”), like watching a movie. However, even though the priest says everything loudly and in understandable language, it does not help at all to feel that he is addressing God and re-presenting the Sacrifice of Christ in an unbloody manner on behalf of the faithful. Continuing our analogy, the “plot” is supposedly the same (the deposit of Faith has not changed), but the level of “knowledge” of the faithful is radically different.
It is possible that illiterate people of past eras (raised on the old Mass) had a deeper faith than those among contemporary intellectuals (raised on the new Mass) who have remained in the Church and so “actively” participate in the new Masses. They read the readings, carry the gifts, and above all, they do not pray the rosary during Mass (a very common example!). “Traditionalists” often mock this “activism.” However, no one can explain what is wrong with it.
The paradox is that although the theoretical goal of the Mass reform was to increase the participation of the faithful (participatio actuosa), in practice the effects are the opposite of what was intended. The changes introduced (which were intended to increase clarity and comprehensibility, i.e., to “warm up” the Mass) have only increased external activity and suppressed internal activity, which is truly community-building. Contemporary Catholic communities that shake hands after meetings and say, “It’s good to have you here,” may in fact be superficial communities. Only internal, cognitive activity creates a deeper community, creates the Church.
If during the new Mass, where everything is seemingly clear, obvious, and understandable, the faithful do not have to complete anything themselves or conjecture anything (which is very difficult anyway, because they are flooded with many more stimuli), then they absorb the content of the reading to a much lesser extent, and their membership in the Community becomes increasingly formal. They cease to feel unity with other members of the Mystical Body. This is the first, painful consequence of introducing the microphone into the Church, concerning the Community. The second concerns the Word.
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| The church of St Matthäus in Düsseldorf, Germany. Notice the obligatory centrality of the mic, with the processional cross and candles to the side. The overhead crucifix only partly cancels out the effect. |
Omnimediatization
After my conversion, I saw and heard many Masses. Very different ones. I quickly turned to traditional Masses, although I never rejected the new ones. I read about the reform, about non-believers and Protestants who once converted, enchanted by the beauty of the Latin Mass. And then they experienced the reform and the pentecostalization of Catholicism. And I began to wonder if today’s Mass could “captivate” someone enough to convert them. If I bring a non-believing friend to Mass in my parish, is there anything here that might delight them? It’s a difficult question...
The vast majority of new Masses are chaotic, and at times even noisy and cacophonous. The new Mass is not appealing at all. I have often wondered whether it is inertia or a miracle that people still come here. In today’s churches, too many things are shoddy, kitschy, and inconsistent. Plastic chasubles and hubbub stand in stark contrast to the thoughtful design and ornamentation of old churches.
Among the more “difficult” experiences, I include the contemporary new Masses known as “children’s,” “for children,” or “family” Masses. Much could be written about them, but I will focus here on one way in which the microphone is used during them. The moment of the homily arrives. The priest does not approach the pulpit or climb into the ambo, but takes a portable microphone, leaves the presbytery and goes into the nave (in front of the balustrade, which is not there) and calls the children to him. They crowd around him. Instead of a sermon, he gives a catechesis and asks the children questions. The children answer. The priest is happy, the parents are happy, because the children are “actively participating” and the content is good and pious. What’s wrong with that?
We already know that the content is actually secondary, because the primary message is the medium. And no one at this Mass is surprised that the priest speaks through a microphone to the children who are within arm’s reach. No one is surprised that they answer him through the same microphone, even though they are standing right next to him. And once during such a Mass, the priest, who after his sermon-catechesis had already asked all the children about their Mass intentions, turned – of course through that portable microphone, of course – to the adults remaining in the pews with the question: “Perhaps the floor has some intentions?”
This servant of the Lord’s constantly devasted vineyard, whose piety and good faith I am firmly convinced of, simply picked up the message from the microphone. He called the faithful who participate in the Sacrifice “the floor.” But it’s really not his fault. He was about 40 years old, so he was raised on Mass with a microphone.
It was only while writing this article that I realized how mediatized our world is, how it is mediated by the means of communication. [4] I tried to find contemporary social events that are not mediatized, and the only things that came to mind were school classes and some funerals of “insignificant people.” It was a shocking discovery for me that there are basically no more social events that are not mediatized. We have to see and hear everything.
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| Nothing should be left unbroadcast. |
And yet, a hundred years ago in Fatima, over 70,000 people came, even though they couldn’t see. They came because they heard that something was occurring. But there was no sound system or zoom on site. They had no guarantee that they would see or hear anything, even if they were right in the center of events. The photos from Fatima in 1917 are, of course, a means of communication, but they are only documents; the events in Fatima themselves were not mediatized for their participants. That is, the means of communication were there, but they were... children, flesh-and-blood children.
Our world has changed significantly over the past hundred years. This would not have been possible without microphones and sound systems. The first such systems were developed around 1915, and two years later, during Christmas 1917 in San Francisco, the Magnavox sound system was publicly presented. In the same year, Our Lady of the Rosary appeared in Fatima. The carbon microphone was invented forty years earlier, in 1876. In 1877, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception appeared in Gietrzwałd. And seven years later, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a truly Job-like vision, or rather “hearing,” because the revelation was (indeed!) acoustic in nature. Jesus spoke with Satan, who, wanting to attempt to destroy the Church (the deposit of Faith!), demanded [5] time (from 75 to 100 years) and greater power over those who would devote themselves to his service. Jesus was to allow this, and Satan chose the “coming” century (usually interpreted, but on what basis is unknown, as the 20th century).
Terrified by this revelation, Leo XIII decided that all priests would recite a set of prayers after low Masses (during the week), kneeling at the foot of the altar (the old one, i.e., together with the people, versus Deum), which were later called “the Leonine Prayers.” These prayers are no longer recited today except at the old Mass (though sometimes their echo can still be heard when, after a parish Mass, the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is recited). The obligation to recite the Leonine Prayers as an “add-on” was abolished by the Consilium led by Bugnini in 1964.
I must admit that when I heard that the new pope had chosen the name Leo, I felt hopeful that this was not a random choice. Although the content of Leo XIII’s revelations is known to many believers, and many believers are familiar with other predictions of a crisis in the Church, priests today do not explain this to the faithful in a convincing manner. For believers, can such temporal coincidences as those mentioned above be purely accidental? Is the intensification of Marian apparitions accidental? Has Jesus really allowed Satan to destroy the Church? When? When will it end? Has it already begun? What would it consist of? Is it a coincidence that God’s people are lost in conjectures and conspiracy theories when the voice of the shepherds has become a processed voice?
Although succession in the Church must still be accomplished through the direct laying on of hands, the Word that priests proclaim today is transmitted. This may seem insignificant to us, but the sound that comes from the speakers is, contrary to appearances, heavily processed, so that the sound does not overlap with the echo of what was said a moment ago. [6] In addition, the priest’s voice today reaches the faithful from all directions (the nearest speaker may even be behind them); it is a “dis-placed” voice. In the past, it had one natural source in the priest’s body. This causes confusion, which is not visible in adults today because they are already accustomed to it, but it can be seen in some of the youngest children (who enter the space of a mass event with a transmitted human voice, not only in church). The microphone created, as McLuhan put it, a “sound bubble.”
This led to the actual elimination of the age-old division of the Temple into three zones (tabernacle – Holy of Holies; presbytery – Holy Place; nave – vestibule), which, in short, does not help the faithful understand that the most important part of the Mass takes place there, in the presbytery, in a slightly different space behind the balustrades. In fact, today the balustrade is often no longer there, because the sound bubble has made the space of churches a homogeneous space of encounter around the Table-Altar.
The voice also sounds at a similar volume all the time (in the old Mass, the priest sometimes spoke loudly, sometimes moderately, sometimes in a whisper). The microphone not only dis-placed the Word proclaimed during Mass, but also, as McLuhan puts it, discarnated it. It is precisely this second, painful consequence of the introduction of the microphone into the Church that concerns the Word.
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| TLM, Rome (Italy), Church of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims. A medium-sized church during a traditional Mass does not require a sound system; the cross is the axis of the celebration. |
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| TLM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Church of St. Anne. A church without a single microphone, neither at the altar nor at the ambo. |
Discarnation of the Word
The lord of death is unable to be born of a virgin like God. The lord of death cannot have his own body. At most, he can enter the bodies of those born naturally. The Church has developed methods to combat possession. But it has not noticed the new trick of the lord of death – a trick with a much greater destructive power than possession: the trick of the discarnation of the Word, which distorts the transmission of the deposit of Faith. That is why I say: Let’s throw the microphone out of the Church!
“Even then Cassandra, who, by the god’s decree, is never / to be believed by Trojans, reveals our future fate with her lips.”
I saw that on most of the new altars, the microphone had taken the place of the cross. The cross stood to the side or behind and became an ornament. Priests today move around the microphone.
But whatever happens, as the Church says, the Lord will come. He was born at night, he comes in silence, he will rise from the heights and illuminate the darkness.
Christmas Day, 2025
NOTES
[1] Let us note in the margin that after a film with special effects, it is more difficult to have a meaningful conversation with other viewers (often these conversations do not go beyond “did you see that” or “that was great”), it is more difficult to talk about such films because we saw the same thing and everything was obvious. When, on the other hand, someone has read the same novel (I don’t mean a crime novel) at the same time, it is often easier to talk about it because we understand many issues and imagine them slightly differently.
[2] Of course, it happens that a narcissistic character dominates a party that consists only of jokes, or that jokes quickly reveal that we will not understand each other, that there will be no community, because completing them would mean repeating stereotypes that offend us. Metaphors are a community-building device similar to jokes, although not as easy to notice. Due to their ambiguity, they also force the listener to make cognitive effort and create a community. In the presence of those who use metaphors that do not offend us, but are close to us, ones that we understand almost instinctively, we feel better.
[3] This is how, by the way, Ashil D. Manohar develops McLuhan’s idea in his thesis entitled The Mass is the Medium: Marshall McLuhan and Roman Catholic Liturgical Change (2021). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/8817. Such an approach may seem strange at first, but it is not foreign to official church documents. Cf. e.g. p. 11 of the pastoral instruction on social communications Communio et progressio: “Communication is more than the expression of ideas and the indication of emotion. At its most profound level it is the giving of self in love. Christ’s communication was, in fact, spirit and life (Jn 6:53). In the institution of the Holy Eucharist, Christ gave us the most perfect and most intimate form of communion between God and man possible in this life, and, out of this, the deepest possible unity between men.”
[4] I also realized that this world is coming to an end because of “Artificial Intelligence,” because it is beginning to eat its own tail. Trust in the media began to crumble earlier (because we began to realize that “the press lies” and “television lies” also today, and not just “during communism” behind the Iron Curtain), but AI will complete this process — once we realize that with its help, our and foreign intelligence services, criminals, and enlightened minds are able to generate hyper-realistic fake news, we will completely lose trust in our “extended senses.” In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before zones free from all kinds of technology begin to emerge. Churches could be at the forefront of this!
[5] I do not have access to the relevant sources, but in reports that can be found on the Internet, Satan’s voice is described as “guttural” or “harsh” , and Artificial Intelligence confirms that early microphones caused such sound distortion and that the human voice transmitted through them was often described as “harsh,” “distorted,” or “raspy.”
[6] This is necessary due to the “outdated” architecture of churches, which was designed for natural voices. Traditional methods of amplifying sound, apart from architecture, were based on the construction of the ambo — raised above the people. A canopy was installed above the pulpit, whose function was not only decorative — the canopy reflected the sound and directed it downwards towards the people, and in addition, a soundboard was often placed in it. However, all these measures amplified the priest’s live and unprocessed voice.
