Papal Messages for World Communications Day

Archive of Commentaries on WCD Messages of Pope Francis 2018-2023

by Bill Schmitt

One of my favorite topics to write about is the annual papal message for the Vatican’s World Day of Social Communications. I began this project in 2018, providing highlights from the messages in my posts at the OnWord.net blog. This blog is now in its tenth year.

Now in 2023, I am marking World Communications Day (always on the Sunday before Pentecost Sunday) by offering my collected commentaries (2018-2023) to readers behind the paywall of “Phronesis in Pieces,” published at billschmitt.substack.com.

Pope Francis’ messages are filled with insights about Catholic values applied to the new media, journalism, communications, and the human community. For more commentary applying the 2018 papal message to journalism and today’s society, please buy my book, When Headlines Hurt: Do We Have a Prayer?, in paperback or Kindle, at Amazon.

A Theology of the Disembodied: The Pope’s AI Caveats Continue

Posted on January 25, 2024 by Bill Schmitt

Among the many ways in which Pope Francis has distinguished himself from his predecessors, he speaks a lot about algorithms. His proclivities as a pastor shine through when he critiques, in words of forbearance and warning, today’s high-tech temptation “to become like God without God.”

That’s a quote from his latest iteration of perspectives on the ethereal battle of Man vs. Machine Learning. It is among the insights in the Vatican’s Jan. 24 release of his 2024 message for World Communications Day, “Artificial Intelligence and the Wisdom of the Heart: Towards a Fully Human Communication.”

One might say that, four decades after Pope John Paul II concluded his landmark presentations on the “Theology of the Body,” Pope Francis is compiling a less formal “Theology of the Disembodied.”

He is summoning the flesh-and-blood faithful to heighten our commitment to mind, heart, soul, solidarity, and dignity at a pace that outwits the growing global endeavor to give us “chatbots” and much, much more.

“A new kind of human being must take shape, endowed with a deeper spirituality and new freedom and interiority,” Francis said in his message, which was posted on the feast day of St. Francis DeSales, patron saint of journalism, months ahead of the Catholic Church’s 58th annual World Day of Social Communications.

“At this time in history, which risks becoming rich in technology and poor in humanity, our reflections must begin with the human heart,” the Pope wrote. “Only by adopting a spiritual way of viewing reality, only by recovering a wisdom of the heart, can we confront and interpret the newness of our time and rediscover the path to a fully human communication.”

Technical extensions of our natural abilities can help the world to overcome its language gaps, better understand our “patrimony of written knowledge from past ages,” and support our thinking in many disciplines “as a means of loving service,” he acknowledged.

But digital dominance can also cause “cognitive pollution” that misinforms and misleads us. He cautioned against a “technology of simulation” which “distorts our relationship with others and with reality.”

Repeating his urgent call for “a binding international treaty” to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI), he said individuals and institutions must also take their own steps to cling to very personal values and responsibilities not recognized by “big data.”

The problem is that “algorithms are not neutral,” as Francis taught this week. They create a risk of “turning everything into abstract calculations that reduce individuals to data, thinking to a mechanical process, experience to isolated cases, goodness to profit, and, above all, a denial of the uniqueness of each individual and his or her story.”

Journalists and communications professionals have a particular duty to focus on truth in order to ensure that all people become “discerning participants” in a meaningful process of teaching, learning, and caring.

“It is unacceptable that the use of artificial intelligence should lead to groupthink, to a gathering of unverified data, to a collective editorial dereliction of duty.”

The Pope provides a long paragraph of questions we should pose toward the technology and toward ourselves.

How will we ensure human dignity in our communications, both among the content generators and audiences? How can we make “the operation of algorithms for indexing and de-indexing” more transparent? How can we govern search engines which are “capable of celebrating or canceling persons and opinions, histories and cultures?”

These are ideas Francis has been mulling for years. His monthly prayer intention for Catholics in November 2020 was “that robotics and AI would remain always at the service of human beings.”

In March 2023, he met with scientists, engineers, business leaders, lawyers, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and members of the Roman Curia at an annual conference on digital technologies called the “Minerva Dialogues.”

He urged the developers of machine learning to “respect such values as inclusion, transparency, security, equity, privacy, and reliability” in order to make AI truly valuable.

As reported at the time by Fox Business News, Francis said regulation of future developments must “promote genuine progress, contributing, that is, to a better world and an integrally higher quality of life.”

A separate Vatican conference on AI ethics in January 2023 allowed him to meet with members of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. They signed a document calling on technologists, who were already seeing a need for a “pause” in their tidal wave of advancements, to make sure future collaborations include leaders in ethics and faith.

Francis returned to the subject in his Jan. 1, 2024, message for the Church’s 57th annual World Day of Peace.

He warned about the use of AI in propaganda, adding that we must apply critical thinking about communication and humility in our geopolitical plans:

“Human beings are, by definition, mortal; by proposing to overcome every limit through technology, in an obsessive desire to control everything, we risk losing control over ourselves; in the quest for an absolute freedom, we risk falling into the spirit of a ‘technological dictatorship.’”

The Pope even became a bit playful in the use of one of his favorite words. He urged “a cross-disciplinary dialogue aimed at an ethical development of algorithms—an algor-ethics—in which values will shape the directions taken by new technologies.”

It’s useful, even galvanizing, to recognize the thought and prayer Pope Francis is investing in the battle of Man vs. Machine Learning, the Flesh-and-Blood vs. the Disembodied.

As seen in his 2024 World Communications Day message, he has studied both the benefits and dangers of any new “wisdom” that is not ensouled with human values and activated virtues. And this pastor knows that our growth in wisdom must also include an embrace of our frailties and mortality, as well as an immortality in the hands of God—not to be handed over to AI.

His teaching of this theology isn’t just another entry in today’s exciting and enticing marketplace of ideas. As he said in his World Day of Peace message, “realities are greater than ideas.”

We can see he realizes that, in this season of zealous faith in technology, religion has picked up the transcendent duty to defend reality, reason, and truth-telling. That’s ultimately the basis for, and content of, good communication.

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On World Communications: Love is News We Can Use

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Bill Schmitt

Pope Francis, posting his 2023 World Communications Day message, has reinforced the sense of urgency and purpose he consistently connects to our use of the media. He has reiterated a Christian “mission” to spread charity through authentic encounters with brothers and sisters everywhere during this “dark hour.”

The Vatican previewed this year’s message, “Speaking with the Heart: The Truth in Love,” on January 24, the feast day of St. Francis de Sales. Marking 100 years since that saint was declared the patron of journalists, the pope cites the Bible’s instruction to make our communication edifying so that “it may impart grace to those who hear.” (Ephesians 4:29)

“Today more than ever, speaking with the heart is essential to foster a culture of peace in places where there is war, to open paths that allow for dialogue and reconciliation in places where hatred and enmity rage,” Pope Francis says. “We need communicators who are … committed to undoing the belligerent psychosis that nests in our hearts.”

The pope calls for Christians to reject divisive rhetoric, “as well as every form of propaganda that manipulates the truth” for the sake of ideologies. Francis warns that words can lead to “heinous violence.” They instead must build trust in a way that “helps create the conditions to resolve controversies between peoples.”

In this week’s preview of World Communications Day, which the Catholic Church has observed on the Sunday before Pentecost since 1967, the pope recalls the model for journalists set by Francis de Sales (1567–1622). That French saint reached out in highly personalized writing, where “heart speaks to heart” through tenderness and “truth in charity.”

Pope Francis explicitly uses the 2023 message to add a third “principle of communication” to two about which he wrote for the most recent World Communications Days.

In 2021, he called for communicators and all Christians to “Come and See”—to be seekers of truth with an eagerness to learn truth by experiencing Jesus, and then to encounter Jesus, one-on-one, with people whose voices were unheard.

In 2022, he urged that we “Listen with the Ear of the Heart”— with humility and compassion—so we become “attuned to the same wavelength” and find common ground amid our mutual frailties.

This year, his instruction to “speak with the heart” entails conveying the truth boldly and frankly, but with a charity that avoids society’s inclination toward manipulation and polarization. Communication must be “a genuine antidote to cruelty.”

His call to “overcome the vague din” of media presentations, with their inclination to “exploit the truth” by injecting disinformation or malevolence, reminded me of my concern when watching or reading some news pundits. Hungry for a full, fair serving of facts, we risk being diverted by presenters who lure us into their arena of negativity. They spend much of their time discrediting our leaders and institutions and even mocking their media competitors and our fellow citizens.

On a happier note, this week’s papal call for kindness, integrating respect for human dignity with the need for comprehensive learning, including uncomfortable facts, reminded me of the power of positivity. This quality, less apparent in the media than it used to be, still draws nourishment from our culture’s roots in Judeo-Christian values.

For example, the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists contains a section headlined “Minimize Harm” as guidance for news-gathering. It instructs reporters and editors to “treat sources, subjects, colleagues, and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.”

Ethical journalists should “balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort,” the code says. “Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.”

The guidelines also call for fairness, compassion, and respect for the rights of private citizens to exercise some control of their personal information.

All these recommendations go hand-in-hand with the pope’s call to communications professionals: They should “reject the temptation to use sensational and combative expressions,”—mirroring the spirit of Francis de Sales as a “saint of tenderness.”

Nevertheless, the secular ethics code is only part of the mix of social, cultural, political, and psychological forces governing the practice of journalism—including the pseudo-journalistic role now played by many non-professionals. We have become our own “publishers” in social media, or avid “consumers” of news. Our stew of information and motivation travels through corroded pipes of confirmation bias and algorithms that promote engagement through enragement.

In the tumult of today’s media, Pope Francis calls for journalists to see their profession as “a mission” which adds to the public’s diet of “clear, open, and heartfelt” communication. In the 2023 World Communications Day message, he envisions an information world—including the subset of Church news outreach— that shuns the artificial, the self-centered, the strategically contrived, and the intentionally false.

Communication is key to all that we do as a Church, as a society, and as a world, the pope says. Our relationships with God and our brothers and sisters make communication a high-stakes game where papal advice has value. And Francis cautions that faltering interactions of truth and trust among nations make things more urgent. He points to “a dark hour in which humanity fears an escalation of war that must be stopped as soon as possible, also at the level of communication.”

Perhaps the stakes are highest on the personal plane, where St. Francis de Sales speaks of cultivating relationships “in the heart and through the heart.” They are the kind of communication through which “we come to know God.” The pope cites this “criterion of love” to ground his latest guide to communicating, just as he used the principles of “come and see” and “listen well” in his 2021 and 2022 messages.

Together, these principles summon us not only into fruitful communication, but also into healthy community and communion. The linkage of these three terms helps to explain why the Church has invested in messages about the secular media for nearly 60 years.

Ultimately, the integrity of this trio of high-sounding terms relies simply on our individual lives as seekers, receivers, and speakers of truth in the light of Christian love and peace. As Pope Francis wrote, echoing what Francis de Sales discerned centuries ago, “we are what we communicate.”

Image from ClipSafari, an online collection of Creative Commons designs.

11 Takeaways from World Communications Day: Remember to “Listen Up” for Weekend Wisdom

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Bill Schmitt

In his 2022 message for World Communications Day, Pope Francis has urged that we renew our ability to listen–to God, to ourselves, to others, and to information from many sources. The Vatican released that message in January, but the Catholic Church’s actual day for its annual reflection on values to enrich the means and media of social communication is the Sunday before Pentecost. That arrives this Sunday, May 29.

It is timely, therefore, to use Memorial Day weekend as a time to put the Pope’s message into action. Our activities, possibly bringing us together with family and friends with whom we have not gathered during the Covid pandemic, returning us to the public square to honor the nation’s soldiers and citizens, can help renew our spirits and relationships if we plan to be better listeners. We can be attentive to people whose lives may have taken a negative turn in various ways; they need to be heard. We can participate in discussions about politics and society–to the degree certain topics are deemed appropriate holiday fare–where others’ voices matter and we can welcome different insights.

To tackle this beneficial project, it’s time to recall key points Pope Francis made when this year’s World Communications Day message was posted online on January 24. His thoughts are indeed worth listening to in preparation for this weekend–and for our mission of more fruitful communication all year round, on both the secular and spiritual planes. Here are some takeaways we can memorialize:

1.       He started with bad news. “In fact, we are losing the ability to listen to those in front of us, both in the normal course of everyday relationships and when debating the most important issues of civil life.” He added a galvanizing point to keep us motivated. “At the same time, listening is undergoing an important new development in the field of communication and information through the various podcasts and audio messages available that serve to confirm that listening is still essential in human communication.”

2.      The greatest need of human beings is to be heard. This is an important guide for parents and teachers, educators and parish ministers, educators and communicators of all types. Our sense of hearing is crucial for God’s interaction with us. “Faith comes through listening.” (Rom 10:17) Listening is a humble act and a freeing act. God sets the model because he “inclines his ear” to us.

3.      Sadly, humans have a tendency to close our ears. We even become aggressive in doing so, the Pope says. [This is the polarization we see continuing to grow in America, manifested in a “cancel culture” where we censor others and even ourselves, missing opportunities to seek truth in partnership with others who have experiences and viewpoints to be shared.]

4.      We are foolish if we try to censor God’s voice, too. He is always eager to reveal himself to us as an act of love. We must be ready to “listen well,” to receive his Word with an “honest and good” heart so that it bears fruit in life and salvation. (Luke 8:15) [Our secular society too often shuts out God from our public—and our interior—conversations. We consider ourselves the masters of our own truths, creators of our own realities. God, as the way, the truth, and the life, is our bridge to reality and to each other; if we make ourselves into gods and set ourselves in opposition to others who are “evil” because they disagree with us, we separate ourselves; the ideas of community and the ecology of God’s creation both break down.]

5.      Listening is a profound thing because “there is an interior deafness worse than the physical one,” says Francis. We must bring our whole personhood into the communication process; it is not just about talking points or manipulation of opinion. We are called to share all of the qualities and dignity that come from our being unique children of God. “And we can only start by listening to what makes us unique in creation: the desire to be in relationship with others and with the other. We are not made to live like atoms, but together.”

6.      This communication must start with listening to oneself—“to one’s truest needs, those inscribed in each person’s inmost being.” [We tend to mask every uncomfortable thing that arises in our own lives, perhaps using drugs, or disconnecting from relationships of responsibility and contribution, or retreating into artificial reality, or simply painting a false Facebook picture of an idealized life. I would say we also need to listen to our consciences and act accordingly, but only after we have done the diligent listening and learning which inform our consciences with virtue and wisdom. Ultimately, listening only to oneself is self-destructive because true information and formation come from God’s grace, inseparable from our relationship with Jesus and the wisdom of the Church, and the experiences of other people through whom that grace is working. We must acknowledge our flaws. That opens our hearts to forgiveness and makes us able to forgive others.]

7.      Listening goes awry when it slips into “eavesdropping and spying” or “exploiting others for our own interests.” Pope Francis says these have worsened in the age of social media. We should listen to learn, to take in truth, to encounter God in others through genuine two-way communication. He suggests the best communication is face-to-face. [So often, we say what others seem to want to hear; this decreases freedom and dignity on both sides of the equation. We manipulate and pander to others. We manipulate words and situations. Our actions and institutions become less authentic, less trustworthy. Information becomes propaganda. Meanwhile, information is also weaponized; many cases of “gotcha” communication uncover and narrowly judge something someone said in a different context or at a different time.]

8.     If we listen only to “talking points” that confirm our own biases or promise to bring us power and personal gain, “we often talk past one another” and fail to communicate the richness of our lives as individuals or the potential of our growth in community. [I think of the recent school-shooting situations, where our hearts yearned for a time of quiet, empathic sorrow over the human toll, but some politicians seized an opportunity to further their self-serving argumentation. The argumentation adopts an oversimplification of, even an ignorance about, the many complicated factors that make life’s tragedies and dramas worthy of deeper reflection. We tend to forget what really matters and to move on to the next item on the agendas of institutions and media. All the world’s a stage, and we are performing as narcissistic individuals, writing other persons out of the script. Much of our social interaction becomes theatrical in nature, geared to empower us, and we shape an “attention economy” where we seek to please our audience, capturing their minds and hearts so they are distracted from other information.]

9.      Pope Francis adds that “there is no good journalism without the ability to listen. In order to provide solid, balanced, and complete information, it is necessary to listen for a long time.” Journalists—and all people—must be willing to take in information that surprises them, challenges them, deepens their understanding of the whole story. “Only amazement enables knowledge.” Francis quotes a diplomat who spoke of “the martyrdom of patience” because becoming truly informed requires patience with others, including difficult people. [The Catholic Church fosters a spirit of wonder—and a “Catholic imagination”—that connects empirical experiences to profound mysteries, adding extra layers of insight that will stick with us and increase our wisdom. Our culture suffers from a severe case of attention deficit, snap judgments, and oversimplification. We fail to listen and learn about a number of interconnected subjects over a long period of time; we pragmatically deal with problems in the present moment, or not at all, without incorporating insights of the past and future. Pope Francis highlights today’s immigration challenges, reminding us that we need to look at population flows as more than statistics, and at migrants as individuals whose diverse stories must be taken into account.]

10.  Pope Francis addresses the Covid crisis and its communications aftermath: “The ability to listen to society is more valuable than ever in this time wounded by the long pandemic,” he writes. “So much previously accumulated mistrust towards ‘official information’ has also caused an ‘infodemic,’ within which the world of information is increasingly struggling to be credible and transparent. We need to lend an ear and listen profoundly, especially to the social unease heightened by the downturn or cessation of many economic activities.”

11.   The Pope also speaks of communication in the Church, where “there is a great need to listen to and to hear one another …. Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by him who is himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the word of God.” This “apostolate of the ear” is a segue into discussion of the current Synod on Synodality, which focuses on listening to everyone for the sake of a more authentic Church community globally and locally. “As in a choir, unity does not require uniformity, monotony, but the plurality and variety of voices, polyphony. At the same time, each voice in the choir sings while listening to the other voices and in relation to the harmony of the whole.”

Pope’s New Statement on Communication: What an Experience!

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Bill Schmitt

Speaking as a long-time journalist who looks to Pope Francis for insights that can help renew the business of information and the art of conversation in our polarized society, I’m happy to say the Holy Father has once again hit a home run with his message for the Church’s 2021 World Communications Day. 

The message, posted online by the Vatican this past weekend, is titled “Come and See: Communicating by Encountering People as They Are.”  World Communications Day #55  won’t arrive until the Sunday before Pentecost, but by tradition the annual messages debut in advance to mark the feast day of Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists, on January 24. Following up on thought-provoking ideas about news-media responsibilities (in 2018), digital-culture dangers (in 2019), and story-telling strengths (in 2020), the diagnoses and prescriptions for 2021 couldn’t be more timely and galvanizing. 

Here are highlights from this year’s reflections, which as always ponder how Catholic wisdom might serve to make contemporary social communication tools more useful as instruments of grace for human flourishing. These information points are based on quotes from our Pope but contain occasional riffs of my own reactions. By all means, please read the eloquent words of Francis directly; among world leaders,  he seeks a seat the table to discuss these things in a constructive way with secular world influencers. I support such conversations among people of good will. May this help: 

§  In a world where some producers and consumers of mass-market information suffer symptoms of passive posturing, narrow-mindedness, and aggressive anger which demonstrate our society’s lack of–and desperate need for–the virtues of faith, hope, and love, the Pope wants to remind us of “the method for all authentic human communication.” That method is the simple yet profound invitation to “come and see” (John 1:46). Jesus showed his disciples that this is the way to build the relationships that enkindle faith, to be part of a meaningful personal experience. An openness by all parties to encounter other persons, one-on-one, with a willingness to listen and learn, as well as to share connections to unvarnished reality for the sake of the common good, a greater good, is the antidote to what ails us in our relativistic solitude. This remedy works at the individual level, at the international corporate level, and at all levels of culture and politics in-between.

§  A major disease rampant in the news business, Francis points out, is that original investigation into the hard and full truth of situations “is being replaced” by reportage built around simplified, manipulative, and “often tendentious” narratives rather than complex stories honoring human dignity. The staffs in too many newsrooms create or convey what advocates want us to know “without ever hitting the streets” to gather and verify facts of life by meeting people face-to-face. These days, large portions of the population act as journalists gathering and spreading information–or misinformation–while “we remain mere spectators” who are not encountering the human (and inevitably divine) truths around us.  “Curiosity, openness, and passion” are lacking. Few participants in this space are testifying to the deepest stories in our lives-a tragic lapse when popes of the past have told us that faith-seekers (or simply truth-seekers and trust-seekers) demand not only teachers, but witnesses. “That is how Christian faith begins, and how it is communicated: as direct knowledge, born of experience and not of hearsay,” Pope Francis writes.

§  There is more at stake than the loss of some human-interest stories that might inspire us. First, the absence of reportorial zeal shows we have lost our sense of wonder and our eagerness to be surprised by the other; we fail to see how that person is impressively different from us and remarkably similar to us. Second, we are learning only about the people or circumstances backed by manipulators; we receive only some of the information we need to become well-formed agents of justice and mercy. For example, as the Pope points out, if we learn tidbits about international COVID-19 vaccine delays “only through the lens of the richer nations,” then we and our news media are “keeping two sets of books.” 

§  While the Internet is a powerful means for sharing truths and learning things we might never have known, social media are risky spreaders of misinformation and blockers of discernment and responsibility. Indeed we do have a responsibility to battle “fake news”–which Francis discussed in his 2018 World Communications Day message–“by exposing it,” he says. “All of us are to be witnesses of the truth: to go, to see, and to share.”

§  So much of the rhetoric that rushes at us through a digital firehose is devoid of meaning.  Francis quotes Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice as saying the empty facts “are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: You shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.” This danger of wasting time reminds me of the TV program, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”. That particular ad-lib comedy show has the virtue of being entertaining and clever, but I hear the Shakespeare metaphor for modern punditry when the TV host speaks; she welcomes us to “the game where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”  

§  The Pope tells us time is not wasted when the Gospel comes alive for us thanks to “the compelling witness of people whose lives have been changed by their encounter with Jesus.” The words of Scripture do indeed bear fruit in people’s lives when, as Saint Augustine remarked, “we have books in our hearts, but the facts before our eyes.” Francis adds, “For two millennia, a chain of such encounters has communicated the attractiveness of the Christian adventure.”

§  Francis personifies this adventure by making a reference that gave me a happy surprise. He speaks of Blessed Manuel Lozano Garrido, a journalist and Catholic who was born 100 years ago in Spain. He is the first lay journalist to have been beatified, and his life captured the potential joy of a journalist who is seeking truth by experiencing people and placing curiosity and wonder in the service of compassion, truth-seeking, and the common good. He even wrote a “Decalogue for the Journalist” that expresses this joy eloquently. When others read what you have written, he tells the periodista, “they too can touch first-hand the vibrant miracle of life.”

§  The Pope ends his message with a prayer that combines all of these points well: 
“:Lord, teach us to move beyond ourselves, and to set out in search of truth. Teach us to go out and see, teach us to listen, not to entertain prejudices or draw hasty conclusions. Teach us to go where no one else will go, to take the time needed to understand, to pay attention to the essentials, not to be distracted by the superfluous, to distinguish deceptive appearances from the truth. Grant us the grace to recognize your dwelling places in our world and the honesty needed to tell others what we have seen.” The invitation to “come and see” is thus revealed as something all of us communicators have a duty to accept and a reason to embrace. This message for the 55th World Communications Day reminds us of our need for experiences that rise above the sterile, distracted, isolationist status of too much news in 2021–a journalism that can deform us as much as it can form and inform us.

See all of Bill Schmitt’s blog posts on communications and Catholic values here at OnWord.net. See his CV and resume here. Find a collection of his recent accomplishments, including links to radio and podcast productions, here.  Reach him by email at wschmitt@hcc-nd.edu. See his Linked-in profile.

This Just In: 2020 World Communications Day Message

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Bill Schmitt

Hello dear readers and fans of the Kyle Heimann Show on Redeemer Radio in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, I was privileged to help “break the news” with Kyle this morning about the Vatican’s Jan. 24 release of the 2020 message for World Communications Day, or the World Day of Social Communications.

You can see the announcement of the message, furnished through the Zenit news service. The brief but prayer-provoking text can be found at this link. Thank you, Pope Francis, for more great words about the peace-making power of words–from Scripture, from our relationships, and from our hearts and minds.

I will be posting more about the 2020 World Communications Day message here, drawn largely from a second on-air conversation I had with Kyle Heimann on Jan 28. Keep checking the Kyle Heimann Showpodcast links to see when my interview has been posted.

Meanwhile, these two items came to my attention: 

§  Religion News Service has an article, “Four Catholic Solutions to Toxic Politics,” written by Rev. Thomas Reese, SJ, long-time Vatican observer. It’s worth looking at, especially its recommendation that we raise awareness of Catholic Social Teaching, which is potentially a strong bridge between “left and right” to help heal our polarized culture.

§  The latest Jordan Peterson video I located  (definitely not the most recent) included observations relevant to the renewal needed in our news media. As he points out in this You Tube talk about belief in God, he is quite familiar with the world of television interviews and journalistic discourse. He expressed dismay that he is asked the most complicated questions about human existence and given one minute to respond. This is part of what he said:

“There’s something downright sinful about answering a really complicated question in a minute because it sort of suggests complex questions have answers that take one minute. And they don’t. They have answers that take, God–sometimes they take decades, and sometimes they take thousands of years…. The format itself works against the kind of thought that’s necessary to actually have the discussions that are necessary.”

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Make a “Net” Work Better (4 New Ideas for 2019 World Communications Day)

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Bill Schmitt

World Communications Day 2019 won’t be officially celebrated until June 2, the Sunday before Pentecost. That’s part of the tradition behind this annual opportunity for reflection, established after the Second Vatican Council to generate insights about how we’re all getting along with each other via the mass media.

Pope Francis has once again allowed us to open this gift early, thanks to the online preview of his 2019 World Communications Day message posted on January 24. That’s the feast of St. Francis De Sales, patron saint of media, writers and journalists.

Here are four useful quotes from this year’s message, titled “We Are Members One of Another: From Social Network Communities to the Human Community.”

§  “The net works because all its elements share responsibility.” Pope Francis praises the power of the digital media to spread an abundance of information and bestow a sense of vast, interactive community. But he cautions that too much of the information we share is used to defame others, spread untruths, violate human dignity, and affirm our narcissistic identities by defining our social-network communities in terms of whom we exclude. Real communities, in physical places or in virtual “social media,” require us to build connections of trust and interdependence, he says. The most resilient communities contain networks we form with others not because they are “the same” as us, but because they are unique, bringing different perspectives.

§  “Therefore, putting away falsehood, speak the truth, each to his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” This quote (Ephesians 4:25) extends the community metaphor to the idea of a body and its many parts, a powerful mirror of the Body of Christ. It echoes the Epistle reading (Corinthians 12:12-30) from the Sunday Mass of January 27, where Paul describes for a different Christian community how the eye must not wish it were an ear or a hand. Each member provides something uniquely valuable: “God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as He intended.” One might say these roles should inspire a sense of empowerment, along with humble truthfulness and responsibility, in each of us. We owe it to each other to be authentic and cooperative, not identifying ourselves by our supremacy or our adversaries. Our community strength comes from our otherness, Pope Francis says, as well as “the connections between that otherness.”

§  “God is not Solitude, but Communion; He is Love, and therefore communication, because love always communicates.” The pontiff extends the network and community metaphors to God as Trinity, a relationship between the lover, the beloved, and the very act of loving. We humans participate in that trinitarian love in our life-giving encounters with others. We must always communicate love, thinking not in individualistic terms—as the media often encourage us to do—but in personal and interpersonal terms. If we use “the Net” to share stories of beauty and suffering that build up our best selves and encourage us to pray and learn together, “then it is a resource.”

§  “The Church herself is a network woven together by Eucharistic communion, where unity is based not on “likes,” but on the truth, on the Amen.” Our joint “Amen” in worship and thanksgiving, clinging to the Body of Christ, encourages us to welcome others as brothers and sisters, and particularly as “traveling companions” on a purposeful journey toward the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The Pope has many other inspiring thoughts in his World Communications Day message, and we among the first readers can start now to consider our responses.

He draws a connection between one’s devotion to the love of God and the networking we do through values-informed conversations in everyday life. That recalls what St. Francis De Sales recommends in Introduction to the Devout Life, as discussed in the January 24 post in the McGrath Institute blog.

Francis sees truth, trust, mercy, and justice as essential to the proper use of online media. Otherwise, our huge daily doses of information may be weaponized. We turn against each other in relativistic wars of labeling and lies. Today’s networks can become traps of vulnerability and isolation, as was discussed in this blog’s January 23 post, with reference to insights from the “Higher Powers” conference of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

The pontiff’s reference to the “Amen” we give in our Church communities reminds us we can activate good stewardship of real-life relationships with God and our neighbors right where we are. As I comment in a book of reflections on Pope Francis’ 2018 World Communications Day message, our Amen in prayer can gratefully affirm the dignity among imperfect children of God. We’re peacemakers called to stem tendencies toward social polarization. God’s communion of redemption overrides any notion of “me-dia” that spotlight me. We share a journalistic role reaching out to a world hungry for good news.

Bill Schmitt is the author of When Headlines Hurt: Do We Have a Prayer? The Pope’s Words of Hope for Journalism (2018), available from Amazon as an e-book and paperback.

An independent journalist, author and marketing-communications consultant with clients in higher education, community-building, and faith-based collaboration, Bill is an experienced commentator on the subject of news, social polarization and problem-solving conversation.

Happy World Communications Day!

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Bill Schmitt

Of course, the most important fact about this day is that it is Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day to all moms, including my own mom in heaven and my wonderful wife Eileen, who is the world’s best mom to our outstanding daughter, for whom we’re lobbying to establish a tradition called Daughter’s Day.

But I want to wish all of you a Happy World Communications Day. This day of remembrance and edification was established 52 years ago by the Catholic Church during Vatican Council II. Its existence on the Sunday before Pentecost every year–and the tradition of annual papal message that accompanies it –are statements of the importance the Church gives to varied means and media of cultural expression.

This year’s message from Pope Francis found special resonance with me because it speaks from his heart about the need to renew the communication of news and the conversations of trust and common cause so necessary for our society’s future. I thought it was a great touch that the message ended with the Pope’s own paraphrase of, or sequel to, the beloved “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis.” I decided to reflect in a structured way on this “Peace Prayer version 2.0,” and my thoughts grew into a book I am preparing to share with a larger audience. The book’s working title is Headlines That Hurt: Do We Have a Prayer?  The Pope’s Words of Hope for Journalism. 

As my World Communications Day gift to all of the good folks whom I welcome as readers of my OnWord blog and as my connections on LinkedIn, I offer a preview of the book. Please go this site’s navbar and click on “Headlines That Hurt.”  Please take a look at the (copyright-protected) thoughts and send me your feedback at billgerards@gmail.com. Perhaps you’ll also consider doing those “friend” and “like” and “follow” and “connect” favors to help me market the finalized book.

When Headlines That Hurt comes out later this month, probably first as an e-book, please consider buying it. I’ll welcome your support if indeed you think, in the spirit of Mother’s Day, my reflections can help give birth to big-picture, faith-and-reason-based discussions about a renewal of journalism, words, conversation, truthfulness and trust in our society. When you click for the preview, don’t worry about this book being too heady or ambitious. As the accompanying photo suggests, I’m striving for a sense of Franciscan joy and keeping it light-hearted.