Article Added On: December 12, 2004 - over 5 years ago
Title: A new station of the Cross
Author: Michael Valpy
Publication: The Globe and Mail
Publication Date: January 01, 2004 - over 6 years ago
Faith Groups: Roman Catholic
Themes: religion in the media

Abstract: The Toronto-based Salt+Light Television channel went national this week with rapping priests and recipes of the saints. It is the reincarnation of the Inner Peace Television Network. The non-profit station, licensed to broadcast in five languages, is now the seventh Canadian religious television broadcasting networks, all of them Christian. The TV station's headquarter was built by donations from Toronto's Catholic community, and its $1.5-million annual budget will come from a charitable foundation. Father Thomas Rosica, station CEO, defines the mission of Salt+Light TV as rising from Catholic World Youth Day, a seven-day event that attracted 200,000 young people, to transmit the traditional teachings of Catholicism in a cool, contemporary package, presenting "the message of a younger vibrant church to an older church."

Thursday, December 9, 2004

You wonder if there was a moment when someone shouted "Divine inspiration!" as the production staff sat around in the scrubbed little studios of Salt+Light Television watching the playback of the pilot segment of Cooking with Saints.

The set: a kitchen -- with stained-glass windows.

The culinary celebrant: Roberto Martella of Toronto's Grano restaurant -- a made-for-television natural, effusively lecturing on the risks posed by globalization to traditional food while preparing tagliatelle Frassati with Piemontese mushroom sauce from a recipe divined by the Blessed Giorgio Frassati himself.

The homilist and creator of the show (and just about everything else on Salt+Light): station CEO Father Thomas Rosica, whose vocation in the priesthood denied God knows how many other professions of a luminary (what he could have done with mutual funds can only be imagined), patting the corners of his mouth with a starched white napkin before reading from the Blessed Frassati's writings.

Toronto-based Salt+Light went national this week, bouncing brassily into the digital universe as the reincarnation of the Inner Peace Television Network.

Think of the Roman Catholic Church with nose-studs, and you more or less get the programming rhythm: pop music, news, documentaries, talk shows, meditations, moral and theological instruction, films with a religious message and saint-food. All with a beat. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. All Catholic.

The non-profit station, licensed to broadcast in five languages (but primarily English and French), is now the seventh of Canada's religion television broadcasters, all of them Christian. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission also last month approved a digital Jewish channel -- JTV -- to be operated by Toronto-based MediaNet Canada Ltd. The station will target "young Jewish Canadians [and] programming that reflects the Jewish religion and lifestyle." The licence conditions require it to broadcast not less than 55 per cent in Yiddish and Hebrew. Philip Koneswaran, MediaNet's vice-president of business development, said the hard part is now convincing cable companies to carry the channel.

Salt+Light's 10,000-square-foot headquarters was built largely through construction donated by Toronto's Catholic community. (The largest single space is the chapel where Rosica regularly celebrates mass for his 25 staff members and 10 volunteers, almost all of them under 35.) It has a prime ground-floor site in one of Toronto's newest trendy addresses, the Queen Richmond Centre.

Its $1.5-million annual operating budget will come entirely -- until Rosica gets advertisers -- from a charitable foundation created by Ontario's Gagliano family and their St. Joseph Corp., Canada's largest privately held printing company (it's what used to be the federal Queen's Printer) and third-largest magazine publisher (Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Wedding Bells and other titles).

And the mission?

Rosica wants Salt+Light TV to pick up where he thinks Toronto's 2002 Pope-attended Catholic World Youth Day left off.

He was plucked from his job as Catholic chaplain at the University of Toronto to organize the biennial event, titled Salt and Light from Christian scriptural injunctions to the faithful to be the salt of the Earth and the light of the world. The seven-day gathering attracted 200,000 young people -- small by previous WYD yardsticks but hardly a few souls hidden in a closet.

Rosica, 45, won universal applause from within the church hierarchy for WYD's stagecraft, a visually superb blending of Catholic culture with secular youth culture, from the high-tech staging of the Catholic devotional Stations of the Cross on Toronto's ceremonial University Avenue to a final papal mass dazzlingly enveloped by dance, music, colour and design.

As Canadian Catholic cultural historian Dan Donovan noted at the time: "It's difficult to be a believer in this age. The great postmodern view is cynicism, skepticism. But there were a lot of kids [at Toronto's WYD] touched very deeply."

The applause for the optics was considerably more muted for WYD's intellectual content.

It was, as theologians say, the magisterial model: a strict presentation of the church's traditional teachings, which young people were not invited to question even though the church in North America is polarizing on the teachings to an alarming degree.

In any event, Rosica says Canadian Catholic churches dropped the ball after WYD and did nothing with the electricity and energy that had been unleashed.

Ergo, Salt+Light TV two years later, rising from WYD's ashes to transmit Catholicism's traditional teachings in a cool, contemporary package; presenting, as Rosica says, "the message of a younger vibrant church to an older church."

How is that schema working its way through Rosica's mind?

"Take your faith over the edge," Salt+Light advertises.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

There are pop-music videos with pulsating bass; Sister Maeve Heaney, the folk-guitarist nun; Father Stan Fortuna from the Bronx, the rapping priest; and Rosica and Globe and Mail film critic Liam Lacey doing analyses of popular films with Catholic content, such asMoonstruck and Babette's Feast. There's also a liturgist from a Catholic university teaching the faith. And one of the first people Rosica chose to interview on his public-affairs program was Toronto's conservative police chief Julian Fantino (although he also talked to the very non-conservative Rabbi Dow Marmur, one of Canada's most distinguished theologians).

Says Rosica: "Salt+Light is going to be different from other attempts at Catholic TV. We're competing [with secular media]. We've got to be as good if not better to survive."

Just how well religious television is doing in Canada is a big question.

The country decidedly is not the same fertile pasture as the United States, where, for example, the Catholic Eternal Word Television Network reaches 65-million homes and is stretching into Canada and Central and South America. But because religious broadcasting in Canada attracts so little academic interest, no one is precisely sure how successful it is.

What evidence there is suggests that it is not in great health. University of Lethbridge religion sociologist Reginald Bibby finds from his annual surveys that the percentage of Canadians who watch religious TV programs has declined from 59 per cent in 1975 to 17 per cent in 2000. St. Paul's University communications scholar Guy Marchessault says religious radio in Quebec (there is no religious TV) has had to get out of what he calls "faith ghettos" in order to survive. And anecdotal reports say religious TV in the rest of Canada is straying more and more into secular programming to attract viewers.

If anyone is going to successfully fish for souls with religious TV in Canada, it will likely be Thomas Rosica.

"We'll use," he says, "any means to teach the faith."

The second instalment of Cooking with Saints features chef Michael Carlevale of Toronto's Prego della Piazza doing St. Gianna Beretta Molla's zuppa Inglese and fried potato croquets. Her son and daughter were in the stained-glass-window kitchen as Carlevale created, leading him to say: "I've never cooked for a saint's children before."

Who has? St. Gianna, who died in 1962, was canonized by the Pope only a few months ago, becoming the first married-woman saint. Rosica asked the family for some of her recipes.

Original article