Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion opens with a pericope describing the first televised papal Mass in the United States-in Yankee Stadium on Oct. Michael’s College in Toronto, and his first books, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) skyrocketed him to public intellectual fame in the television age. In our class, he spoke about his new book and shared its thesis: “McLuhan’s Catholicism is not a footnote but rather a foundation of his media theories.” For a thinker like McLuhan, who is not as widely celebrated as other 20th-century American Catholic thinkers, this simple thesis is a surprisingly radical new paradigm.īorn in Alberta, Canada, in 1911, McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937 while at Cambridge writing his dissertation. Nick Ripatrazone, author of Digital Communion, visited one of these Zoom classes. In the 1960s, McLuhan already saw the internet on the horizon when the rest of the world was falling in love with broadcast television. We watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” discussed the phenomenon of Wordle on our class message boards and consumed media theorists Walter Ong, S.J., and Marshall McLuhan. We pondered Andy Warhol’s imagination and learned the communication theory behind Fred Rogers’s television neighborhood. We read theology from Bonaventure and Romano Guardini, as well as from ecological thinkers like Rachel Carson. We met via Zoom for two months at the beginning of 2022 to discuss a wide range of readings.
Our cohort consisted of college professors, high school teachers, writers, digital media entrepreneurs, seminarians and two artists (myself one of them). “Communications professionals” was a broadly defined term. The program brought together around 30 communications professionals to read, learn and create projects to help the church communicate its message in a digital age. I began writing the play as part of the Church Communications Ecology program at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.
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