I’m not a Christian and don’t make a habit of watching Christian TV stations, but ever now and then I encounter one while channel-surfing.
Protestant networks such as CTN have a certain entertainment value, IMO. You might tune in to a sermon, a choir performance, a talk show or panel discusion, or an unintentionally hilarious End Times dramatization.
But when I tune to a Catholic station, what I usually see is a bunch of nuns praying. That’s all. Just a bunch of nuns reciting formulaic prayers. Or a priest conducting mass. Or just a still picture of an altar or shrine with hymns or prayers in the background. Occasionally a sermon, but that seems to be rare. Why would anybody, even a Catholic, bother to watch such stuff? I mean, it’s just exactly like attending a Catholic church service, except you don’t get to participate or take communion. What’s the thinking behind this?
My father, for one. He likes the music from the Masses, and sometimes they have a program called “Joy of Music”, with this one woman who goes around to different churches in Europe and the US and plays different pieces. Diane Bische or something?
Sometimes they have what I call “Katholic Klassics”*, movies like Song of Bernadette, or the super creepy Marcelino pan y vino.
Sometimes, they have documentaries about various saints or people in the church.
*I am NOT comparing the Catholic church to the Ku Klux, or trying to be like people who write Amerika. “Katholic Klassics” is more like Kountry Korners or Kute Kitty Kat. Schlocky, cutesy, that sort of thing. The only reason I’m explaining is that the last time I used that term, someone near tore my head off.
The only Catholic cable channel I know is the Eternal Word Network
It’s on the conservative side of Catholicism.
Catholics, for the most part, don’t like long sermons given by theatrical preachers. It’s just no our style. We like ceremony and rituals passed down throughout the years.
There used to be a drama series called “Insight” that was produced by a Paulist priest, Ellwood Keiser I believe was his name. Used to run on Sundays in L.A. Martin Sheen appeared in a lot of them. They were usually very good stories. They weren’t biblical stories. They were modern day stories centered around some sort of moral or ethical issue.
Remember that most Catholics are to the left of Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson would consider someone like Cardinal Ratzinger to be a dangerous heretic.
I took my mom to a Peruvian restaurant and the Spanish language channel had some show featuring a Catholic priest who kept picking fights and doing unsavory shit. (We’re Catholic and don’t speak much Spanish.) It really resembled that King of the Hill thing where a gun-toting priest blows some dude away and says “Vaya con Dios.”
We watched the credits and noticed that the show was funded/produced/affiliated in some way with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Go figure.
Also note how much free publicity the Catholic Church is getting with the death of the pope and the election of a new one.
Other denominations don’t get that much publicity. It’s not like all the Episcopalians in the U.S. would stay glued to their TV to find out who the new Archbishop of Canterbury is. Nor do most people (including me) have the slightest idea how a new one is chosen (presumably the bishops vote or does the Queen just go, “You there, wanna be the Archbishop of Canterbury?”)
when I learned they were based in Alabama, I thought, gee, not what I would guess as a hotbed of Catholicism… but then I thought, no wait… a Catholic Channel based in a hotbed of Catholicism (Chicago, LA, Philly, etc.) will eventually have some “troublemaker” on-air. Somewhere where they feel surrounded by fundies who believe they’re not real Christians, they’ll be circling the wagons tightly. Either that or some televangelist went broke and they got the station cheap in the fire sale.
But as mentioned, it’s not all-rosaries, all-the-time. And even there, a devout practicing Catholic will set aside some time for collective prayers and the various liturgies.
And when they want them, EWTN, like much of Cable TV, reaches back to the old-time classics – to wit, the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s shows from the 1960s. Now that was some fiiine old-school stage oratory/apologetics (and the dude could really work the full-dress cassock look) Best part of it: the old guy never ended the sermon with a call to send money.
(Of course, for the next couple of months, it’s gonna be all-Pope, all the time, when not actually doing services)
Here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we have (I think) 3 Catholic channels. One is EWTN and the rest are locals. I believe we only have one Protestant/nondenom channel and it’s a national.
Very much so.
