A big earful of Catholic words and music

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 27, 1995 by Danny Duncan Collum

This is what I knew about Catholic audiotapes two months ago. We have a neighbor who listens to them constantly - in the car, on the back porch, at the playground, even while talking on the phone. She's a regular sight, making her way around the 'hood surrounded by children ages 3, 5 and 7, her portable tape player playing some priest or theologian or another.

Then there's the devout convert married to the skeptical professor. He's a former seminarian who, since the children are grown, refuses to set foot in church. She tries to re-evangelize him by playing her spirituality tapes, ostensibly to break the monotony on those long car trips to visit grandchildren.

For a few days t-his September I checked in with four Catholic distributors of audiocassettes: St. Anthony's Messenger/Franciscan Communications; Modern Cassette Library (Ave Maria Press); Credence Cassettes (of the National Catholic Reporter Publishing Co.); and Pauline Books and Media (Daughters of St. Paul).

When I had learned a little bit more, I discovered that those two acquaintances of mine are virtual poster people for the world of religious audiocassettes. According to Charley Jones at Ave Maria, the core audience for their Modern Cassette Library is "women age 50 to 70," and the hot topic, year in and year out, is spirituality.

"We can go to a conference on religious education," he says, "and still it's the spirituality tapes that turn their heads."

That fits the professor's wife to a "T", but what about my thirtysomething neighbor with the passion for church history and moral theology? Well, her age and interests may be unusual, but her use of the cassette medium couldn't be more typical.

Clarence Thomson of Credence says cassettes are "perfect for busy people." He illustrates this with a story of a father and son at the beach. The boy fills his bucket with sand to the very brim. The father looks on and says, "I bet I can get something else in there." "No way," says the boy. But the father wins the bet by pouring water into the sand. Listening to tapes is the water on the sand. It is something you can add to an already full day. It is something you can do while doing something else. That's my neighbor.

Without fail, the religious-cassette marketers consulted for this article report that their individual customers use spoken-word tapes most in the car, usually while commuting to and from work. This adds new significance to the title of Ave Maria's best-selling tape, "A Spirituality of Waiting," by Fr. Henri Nouwen. It must be ideal for red lights and backed-up freeway exits. Look for "God in the Gridlock," coming soon.

The religious audiotape business took off in the late 1970s, after the death of eight-track cartridges, when automakers started routinely putting cassette players in cars. The cassette was invented in 1965 and became a standard consumer item about a decade later. It is mainly a format for music, but spoken-word uses were obvious, too. Books on tape, for instance, quickly became an auxiliary profit center for mainstream publishers, especially on self-help and motivational titles.

The Catholic spoken word tapes evolved in the same way. Thomson remembers Credence beginning in the late 1960s, when cassettes first appeared, with a charge to make the new medium available to the Catholic church. The tape operation really took off, Thomson says, in 1978-80.

Twenty years ago the fledgling audiotape operation at St. Anthony's Messenger recorded and released a talk by Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr. The two-tape set was called, "Breathing Under Water: Spirituality of the 12 Steps." It is still available and has sold more than 10,000 copies. This established a familiar name in Catholic spirituality and something of a pattern in the Catholic cassette market.

Speaking to the spirit

For the mainstream Catholic market the spoken-word cassette is mainly a medium for nourishing the spiritual life. Tom Bruce of St. Anthony's Messenger points out that "spirituality" as a category includes what, in the secular market, would be called "self-help" or "personal growth." These dominate tape sales, he says, "as they do in books."

Thomson says the overriding purpose of his audiotape operation "is to nourish piety and spiritual life." The audiocassette. n especially apt medium for spirituality, he says, " because it is an intensely personal medium, it communicates from inside one person to inside another." The tape is also an experiential medium. "It is an experience," Thomson says. "Unless you're good readers, it is difficult to create an experience in print."

The strength of the audio medium for spiritual a nourishment parallels its weaknesses as a tool for more linear intellectual pursuits. Audiocassettes are an experiential medium partly by default. "It's a lousy retrieval system," Thomson said, and anyone who has tried to find a favorite passage on a tape will say, "Amen."

You can't skim through an audiocassette as you can with a book or even "fast-forward" search the way you might with a videotape. And you certainly can't "word search" the way you can on a computer. To locate a particular spot in a tape you're at the mercy of the three-digit tape counter, if your player has one. And here is the "lousy" part: No two cassette players "count" the same There is no standardization among the different machines and so no possibility for indexing.