Our Sunday Visitor's Pope Benedict XVI

Reports from Rome by Greg Erlandson, publisher

Roman Journal: The Transition--7

Our Sunday Visitor Publisher Greg Erlandson traveled to Rome to cover the Papal Conclave. He filed reports as the week progressed with his observations and commentary.

The death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI constitute the first papal transition of the digital age. In ways that are only slowly being appreciated, how the Vatican presents itself to the world has been significantly changed by the omnipresence of the cell phone, the Internet and digital video.

Vatican reporters said that news of the Pope’s death was communicated to them via text messages from Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls to their cell phones. News of the death was instantly transmitted around the world, and reporters filed reams of copy via the Internet in the days that followed.

Television viewers saw the pilgrims who waited for hours in line to view the body of Pope John Paul II recording the moment with photos snapped by their cell phones and digital cameras.

Less well known is that the Vatican web site was swamped by hits in the period immediately following the Pope’s death. Sister Judith Zoebelein, the enterprising American who is the webmaster and driving force behind the Vatican’s constantly improving website, told me that on average the Vatican web site gets 3.5 million hits a day. In the day of the pope’s death, it received 55 million hits, and that pace continued for some days. The volume of hits forced the Vatican web site to go off line temporarily. Because of a long planned upgrade, however, Sister Judith was able to quickly add 12 servers to handle the unprecedented volume. Millions of people, she said, were able to pay their respects to John Paul II and even view his body on line, joining the hundreds of thousands who waited in line to do the same.

“The desire to know about the Church is enormous,” Sister Judith said during an interview in the new offices of the Vatican web site, and this curiosity was heightened during the suffering and death of the Holy Father.

Sister Judith and her staff rose to the occasion, putting in long hours and staying overnight in their offices in order to meet the demand.

The performance of the Vatican web site was “a real success story,” she said, adding that “this success story showed many people in the Vatican that the web site is an instrument that can be used for the Church.”

Once the conclave began, the digital revolution meant that new measures had to be taken to protect the secrecy of the conclave when it met. Jamming devices were installed in the Sistine Chapel to prevent cell phone calls and to thwart any sort of electronic eavesdropping.

In these days, many of the 6,000 journalists who gathered in Rome were able to report every rumor and every speculation via blogs and web reports, so that any interested Catholic could be as confused as those of us on site.

When the white smoke signalled the election of a new pope on April 19, thousands of people rushed to St. Peter’s Square and immediately began calling friends and family on their cell phones. I was able to call the offices of Our Sunday Visitor and my wife before the cell phone network ground to a halt from the flood of phone calls being made.

Unlike previous papal elections, when every eye strained to see the distant balcony from which the new pope would first bless the world, this time one could watch the historic event on four giant digital screens. It felt a bit like watching a jumbotron at a football game, with the cameras panning the crowd and provoking cheers and waves as the people excitedly awaited the announcement, “Habemus papam.”

Once Pope Benedict presented himself to the faithful of Rome, every expression of the new pope was visible in an unprecedented and intimate way. All that was missing was the instant replay!

On Sunday, Pope Benedict will be formally installed during a Mass in St. Peter’s Square at which a half a million pilgrims are expected to attend. Again, the giant television screens will make this event more intimate than perhaps it has even been. While it may be nearly impossible to receive Communion if you are not in the front of this enormous crowd, it will certainly be possible for everyone to see the Consecration.

The new digital age of the papacy has begun, but the true impact on the Church remains to be seen. Sister Judith isn’t waiting, however. She hopes to see the Internet become a great means of catechesis and community for Catholics, particularly the young, and she is already steering the Vatican web effort in this direction.

While she does not know how Pope Benedict might be planning to use the web, she did tell me that during his tenure as its prefect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had been very open to the Internet and had a very collaborative relationship with her office.

Perhaps this shy intellectual will have a relationship with his flock as extraordinary as that of his predecessor – not because of travels and speeches, but because of the remarkable digital intimacy of our brave new world.