Mtr Beth Clarke

Friends in Christ,  

Did you know that the first livestreamed church service did not take place in the twenty-first or even the twentieth century? It took place in the thirteenth century, and the viewer was the saint we celebrate today, Clare of Assisi. 

Confined to her bed by severe illness late in life, Saint Clare could not join her sisters for Mass on Christmas Eve in 1252. Clare, famously pious in her love for the Eucharist and broken-hearted to be missing the service, miraculously saw the liturgy projected onto the wall of her room. She saw the altar, heard the chants, and later named the friars present. 

When television became widespread in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII named Clare its patron saint. 

What I love about Clare’s story is that it offers a mirror image of what I fear about our modern consumption of content through screens. Sometimes, as in Clare’s case, our screens offer genuine connection when being somewhere in person is not possible. When I lived in Taiwan, I cherished my weekly FaceTime calls with my family in Phoenix. And for so many of us during the pandemic, our screens truly drew us closer to one another. Livestreaming Mass today also offers people who, like Clare, cannot attend in person a way to engage in worship. It is an important tool for accessibility. 

But there is also a dark side, one that I could spend thousands of words naming. For brevity’s sake, let’s consider social media apps and data centers. Social media apps can offer connection, but they can also be dangerous, particularly for young people. And our wild consumption of digital content is not immaterial. Technology companies are building massive data centers across the United States to sustain it, consuming tremendous amounts of energy. Especially here in Arizona, the water required to run these facilities should give us serious pause. 

Perhaps this is what Clare’s story can offer us eight centuries later. Her miraculous screen did not distract her from the world around her; it connected her to something from which illness had separated her. She was not imagining things on her wall to escape her reality; she received a vision from God because she desperately wanted to participate in Mass with a community she loved. 

In the end, Clare’s screen drew her more deeply into communion; perhaps the question for us is whether our technology does the same. 

Yours in Christ, 

—Mtr Beth