I am willing to grant there is something basically religious in the fervour of those engaged by the Pope’s funeral — beyond the mere fact that Roman Catholicism is officially a religion. But it seems to me this is religious in much the same sense as those who flock fervently and devoutly to participate in the Girls Gone Wild tour. You know Girls Gone Wild: their bus pulls into a city, young women apply to get on and party with the crew till everyone is drunk; then they go to a club where the girls are filmed lifting their tops, and the results are sold as videos.
Bear with me on this. There has been a lot of academic “work” on Girls Gone Wild. A Calgary prof is studying reasons for the behaviour, though she’s having trouble getting the girls to talk. This signals they have something serious (literally) to hide. And a Maryland anthropologist has the answer: “They want to be part of something bigger.” That works for me.
Human beings “always seek ultimate integration,” wrote the late philosopher Emil Fackenheim. Integration with what? With as much as possible: humanity, history, the universe, whatever is bigger than their own small lives. It’s a way to insert meaning in your brief existence. Five or ten years ago, I knew students who proudly claimed they were living through the greatest episode of technological change in history — mostly because they could get e-mail. You can find other technologies that caused far bigger change, but the point was they needed to feel their lives involved something large.
My own student cohort liked to feel we were making “The Revolution,” which would transform society and history. It’s all the same, in terms of motive: something bigger. If you can’t do something bigger, then you try to at least attend it, that’s why people flock to events they hope will be historic. Hey, the guy was a Pope. He died. He gets buried. That should count. It’s all part of that quest to be part of something bigger.
Yet, it rarely seems to work. You always must get on to the next bigger thing in the search for meaning. Last week it was Terri Schiavo. Next week, Michael Jackson. At least the Pope is a religious figure, but that makes it worse in a way: It’s like using religion to substitute for religion. Hmm. That sounds sacrilegious, especially if you include the media’s role. “We’ve been here since the feeding tube,” a TV engineer told The Globe and Mail‘s Alan Freeman. Global’s Kevin Newman said, “This is great TV: You’ve got 3-million people at the largest funeral in human history” — talk about something bigger — “and it’s about something positive.”
In fact, you could see the networks decide to treat the funeral as a happy story. The anchors all began smiling, as if their producers had issued an edict. The story has the virtues of accident or crime stories, in the sense that there’s no politics or controversy to alienate a chunk of viewers. And they’ve managed to present it as if nothing negative — like death, disease or suffering — were involved, so as to achieve TV’s ultimate aim: a serene buying mood. Their funeral coverage is as crass as Girls Gone Wild, but camouflaged with the sanctity (I don’t know whether to put that in quotes or not: the “sanctity”) of the Pope. I think they should be chased out of the Vatican the way the moneychangers were from the Temple. There is probably more integrity to doing Girls Gone Wild.
Why does it all fail to fill the need for meaning? The secret to meaning is: You find it in daily life or not at all. Hallowing the everyday is the core of religion, you can’t just seek the holy in the extraordinary. It’s like trying to fill the need for theatre by having an annual theatre festival, even though you don’t have an ongoing theatre culture. But if you have the everyday thing, you don’t really need the big-deal festival. The real failure of this Pope is that he substituted his own global celebrity cult — the endless tour — for an everyday, on- the-ground cultivation of his church. He wouldn’t entrust it to the locals — bishops or parishioners — he stifled what had been building during Vatican II. It was like a glorified version of Going My Way, or the highway.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
