@ Worship

Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds

Teresa Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351670623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

A host of both very old and entirely new liturgical practices have arisen in digital mediation, from the live-streaming of worship services and "pray-as-you-go" apps, to digital prayer chapels, virtual choirs and online pilgrimages. Cyberspace now even hosts communities of faith that exist entirely online. These digitally mediated liturgical practices raise challenging questions: Are worshippers in an online chapel really a community at prayer? Do avatars that receive digital bread and wine receive communion? @ Worship proposes a nuanced response to these sometimes contentious issues, rooted in familiarity with, and sustained attention to, actual online practices.

Four major thematic lines of inquiry form the structure of the book. After an introductory chapter the following chapters look at digital presence, virtual bodies, and online participation; ecclesial communities in cyberspace; digital materiality, visuality, and soundscapes; and finally the issues of sacramental mediation online. A concluding chapter brings together the insights from the previous chapters and maps a way forward for reflections on digitally mediated liturgical practices.

@ Worship is the first monograph dedicated to exploring online liturgical practices that have emerged since the introduction of Web 2.0. Bringing together the scholarly tools and insights of liturgical studies, constructive theology and digital media theories, it is vital reading for scholars of Theology and Religion with as well as Sociology and Digital Culture more generally.

1 The why, how, and what of studying liturgical practices in digital worlds

A look at a Papal Mass, celebrated in Philadelphia in 2015 and live streamed around the world, serves to introduce the themes of this chapter.

On a beautiful late afternoon in September of 2015, Pope Francis presided at Mass in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Hundreds of thousands of people were in attendance. Millions watched on television or followed the Mass on their computers, tablets, or smartphones (the PopeApp was in high demand). How many people, one might ask, were celebrating this liturgy together then? Who exactly were the gathered people of God at this Mass? The Archdiocese of Philadelphia had pondered these questions in advance and readied answers. Its “Guidelines for Streaming the Papal Mass to Remote Locations” insisted that following this Mass in a remote location did not fulfill the Sunday obligation for Catholics, although “remote” worshippers were encouraged to make a “Spiritual Communion.”¹ What the guidelines did not address was what exactly constitutes “remoteness” in the digital age. What about the thousands of people, for example, who filled the Benjamin Franklin Parkway that afternoon but were quite “remote” from the ambo and altar? The 40 Jumbotrons simulcasting the Mass along the Parkway and in the city center offered a close-up view of course. And worshippers along the Parkway and around the globe also followed the Mass via the PopeApp in the palms of their hands. But at which distance from the pope exactly did Mass attendance become “remote” in the context of this liturgy?

My own attendance at Mass that afternoon only added to the complexity of being at worship and also @ worship. I went to Mass in my local community, where I also sing in the choir. Seated in the back balcony of the sanctuary, some choir members were following the Papal Mass in Philadelphia on their smartphones. They had a fitting reason for this liturgical multi-presencing: our composer-in-residence had written the communion antiphon sung at the Papal Mass, and the choir wanted to share in that extraordinary moment. In a way, we seemed to be celebrating Mass in two places that afternoon – that is, until everything fused into one seamless moment when our priest proclaimed, in the Eucharistic Prayer, that this Eucharist was celebrated “in communion with Francis our Pope.”² The prayer named a digitally mediated experience of “communion” that the creators of the text could not have imagined, yet whose theological articulation is centuries old. It is also ever new. And its newness under the conditions of digital culture is what this book contemplates.

Why study liturgical practices that are digitally mediated?

Questions surrounding Papal Masses are not necessarily the questions of everyday liturgical life. Yet in the preceding case, given that these are questions of digital mediation and presence, they are part and parcel of the everyday, because we now live, move, and have our being in “the digital age.” That reality is the elemental motivation behind this book. Some may wonder: Why would a scholar of liturgy focus the interpretive tools of her scholarly field on these practices? Why is attention to liturgical practices that are digitally mediated of importance today? Why is ignoring these practices not an option? Answers to these questions come from different sources and directions. For the present book, three such answers stand out.

Digital “signs of the times”

First and foremost is the simple, pressing need to attend to “the signs of the times.” This ecclesial task was articulated in Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The famed passage declares: “In every age, the church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.”³ The phrase “signs of the times” reappears, liturgically, in one of the post-conciliar Eucharistic Prayers for Various Needs, where God is asked to grant “that all the faithful of the Church, looking into the signs of the times by the light of faith,” may serve the Gospel.⁴ The signs of the times, with regard to digital technologies and media, are not hard to decipher. We have entered the digital age, and digitally suffused living is here to stay.⁵ Even self-proclaimed Luddites cannot but live in this digital age, although they will do so with various strategies of resistance (some of which are digitally mediated!). Moreover, given the continuously expanding world of digital technologies, the scope of digitally suffused living will only increase in the years to come. Most of us need little convincing that we do indeed live in the digital age. Our daily lives are not only suffused, but shaped by digitally mediated technologies. In order to appreciate the magnitude of this development, some statistics prove helpful, as they put concrete numbers on our own experiences. Around the world, 3.2 billion people were using the internet in 2015; and the numbers are constantly rising (fifteen years ago, the figure had stood at a mere 400 million).⁶ Facebook is actively used by over one billion people every day, and by over one and a half billion people every month.⁷ YouTube has over six billion video views a day, and more than 400 hours of new video content is uploaded to the site every minute.⁸ Those of us with children who are digital natives know all too well how different their daily lives are from those of their parents who are digital immigrants. According to a recent report, roughly three-quarters of all teenagers in the United States have access to a mobile phone.⁹ And as with most cultural trends, markers of difference such as race, gender, and class do matter. Yet they do not always matter in ways one might expect. In the United States, for example, the last decade has significantly altered a digital divide rooted in socioeconomic status and race, owing to the advent of affordable mobile technologies. To cite only a couple of examples: nowadays, African American teenagers are the most likely to have a smartphone, and almost a quarter of Twitter users are African American. Eighty-five percent of African American teenagers have access to a smartphone, compared to 71% of White and Hispanic teenagers. Over 90% of all teenagers in the United States report going online daily. Roughly a quarter are online almost constantly (being in the shower was named as the one exception!).¹⁰ However disconcerting such statistics may be, digital natives are the future. Those of us who are digital immigrants are in decline. The signs of the times are thus quite clear: the digital age and digitally suffused living are here. And it would be nonsensical to assume that practices of worship and prayer are the one area of life immune to and untouched by the advent of the digital age.

Practicing faith in digital worlds

A second reason for scholars of liturgy to attend to the digital signs of the times is rooted in the significant role faith and spirituality play in digital cultures. Online religion sites, for example – emerging at a time marked by the “implosion of the secular” (Graham Ward) and the resurgence of religion – have been among the fastest-growing sites in cyberspace, surpassing in number even those dedicated to sex.¹¹ The Bible app YouVersion (a free, digitally mediated Bible) is an example of the power of religious practices in digital social space. As of 2016, this app has had more than 228 million downloads, which makes it equal, in terms of users, with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.¹² These numbers suggest that anyone interested in religious practices, those of prayer and worship included, will have to look closely at digital worlds and religious practices in them. It is clear that both very old and entirely new liturgical practices are flourishing online. They range from broadcasts of liturgical celebrations over the internet, virtual altars, online chapels, cyber rosaries, prayer apps with streaming video and image galleries, memorial sites, online pilgrimages, digitally mediated Eucharistic Adoration and novenas¹³ to new resources such as a “twomplet” (Compline on Twitter, in tweets), digital Advent and Lenten calendars, and an app for Catholic Meditations on Purgatory. There are also communities of faith that exist online alone, for example in web-based interactive virtual reality environments such as Second Life. Clearly, digitally mediated liturgical life is rich, multifaceted, and effervescent. It is also ceaselessly expanding.

This migration of practices of prayer and worship into digital worlds has to be seen in a larger context of shifting ways of practicing faith. While means of social communication expanded exponentially in the wake of novel technologies, attendance at worship declined dramatically, at least in the North Atlantic world. In the words of a snappy headline: millennials are saying “Yes to Facebook and No to Organized Religion.”¹⁴ Statistics bear this out, if by “religion” is meant established, organized, and authorized brick-and-mortar religious practices. To cite but one contemporary indication of this trend: 72% of young adult Catholics in the United States use social networking sites, while only 15% attend Mass weekly.¹⁵ Yet while attendance at worship in brick-and-mortar churches has plummeted, the frequency with which Catholics pray in their daily lives has actually remained more or less unchanged since the early 1980s.¹⁶ This is important not least with regard to praying online. While American Catholics are much less likely to attend church than in decades past, they seem not to pray less in their daily lives. And some of this praying is now digitally mediated. There has in fact been a veritable boom of apps facilitating prayer and meditation in recent years. As one journalist noted: “It turns out prayer and smartphone habits go well together.”¹⁷ To put this point differently, the two movements – of decline in attendance at public worship on the one hand, and of the rise of digital communication technologies on the other hand – have also spawned a world that has conjoined these seemingly disparate realities. Practices of worship and digital means of communication have converged in cyberspace in ways unimaginable just half a century ago. For example, when the Second Vatican Council promulgated, as its first two documents, the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium on the Sacred Liturgy, and the Decree Inter Mirifica on the Means of Social Communication, these texts shared little but the date of their publication. Only minor overlaps existed thematically between the two documents. Sacrosanctum Concilium briefly mentioned means of social communication, insisting on “delicacy and dignity” for liturgies broadcast on radio and television.¹⁸ Inter Mirifica had nothing to say about liturgical life. After the Council, the two documents went their separate ways. Sacrosanctum Concilium quickly became a much-studied text, while Inter Mirifica remained largely marginal. Today, the same two topics could not be addressed without sustained attention to the sites where worship and means of social communication now overlap.

And while it is true that in the United States, White Evangelicals and African American Protestants are more likely than any other Christians to engage in religious activities online, the Roman Catholic Church certainly is on the higher end of the spectrum of digital communication, especially in its global reach. The Vatican has actively extended its digitally mediated presence, with its own YouTube channel, a PopeApp that allows one to follow in real time major liturgies, a papal Twitter account in nine languages with more than twenty-seven million followers, and – most recently – a papal Instagram account. Pope Francis often highlights practices of prayer and worship when using digital communication technologies. The papal Instagram account, for example, opened with a photo of the pope kneeling in prayer. The caption read “Pray for me.”¹⁹ After his election to the papacy in 2013, Francis prayed via a webcam at the tomb of St. Francis, posting an online prayer to the saint via a tablet.²⁰When the Shroud of Turin went on display for a special appearance on Italian television in the same year, the pope sent a video message, saying:

I join all of you gathered before the Holy Shroud, and I thank the Lord who, through modern technology, offers us this possibility. Even if it takes place in this way, we do not merely “look,” but rather we venerate by a prayerful gaze.²¹

The pope has also embraced new forms of liturgical gathering enabled through digital communication technologies, such as the first-ever synchronized worldwide Eucharistic Adoration in June of 2013. And since the beginning of 2016, the monthly papal prayer intentions are broadcast on the social media platforms of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

I note in passing that it is by no means only Roman Catholics or Christians who have embraced digital social space for their practices of faith. Ritual life in cyberspace is exceedingly diverse and multi-religious. There are vibrant Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist sites, to name just some of the traditions present in digital social space.²² Moreover, there is a host of diffusely religious and vaguely spiritual sites that offer digitally mediated ritual practices. The vast number of apps for guided meditation and mindfulne...