Pope on Media Day: 'I dream of a communication that gives hope to the world'

VATICAN CITY - In his message for the 59th World Media Day, Pope Francis calls on media professionals to favour a non-aggressive way of communicating and informing that does not deal in illusions and fear, but knows how to seek and spread stories imbued with goodness that make the world less deaf to the cries of the last.

Alessandro De Carolis - Vatican City

In his message for the 59th World Media Day, published today, 24 January, the day on which the Church commemorates St Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists and writers, Pope Francis draws on an examination of contemporary modes of information provision, which are often anything but a creator of hope. He writes that there is communication that creates fear and despair, prejudice and resentment, bigotry and even hatred. Too often such communication simplifies reality by reducing it to slogans in order to provoke instinctive reactions, or uses words as blades and goes so far as to disseminate false or artfully distorted information in order to market messages designed to irritate, to provoke, to hurt. Francis goes on to note that this mode of expression betrays a communication based on aggression, where from talk shows to wars of words on social media, the paradigm of competition, of opposition, threatens to prevail at any moment, even to the manipulation of public opinion.

Communication that speaks to the heart

In the face of this scenario marked by disturbing phenomena - not least what the Pope calls the "programmed distraction" caused by digital systems that profile us "according to the logic of the market" and "modify our perception of reality" - it is necessary, he insists emphatically, to break out of the logic of communication, which needs to identify the "enemy" and then define itself against it. Francis's hope, indeed his "dream", is, on the contrary, the hope of "a communication that could make us companions with many of our brothers and sisters", that would "inspire hope in them in such troubled times". A communication that would speak "to the heart" and arouse "not passionate reactions of closure and anger, but attitudes of openness and friendship, capable of focusing on beauty and hope even in the most seemingly desperate situations".

Moderation, not "talking over each other"

The paradigm that inspires the Pope's vision comes from the First Letter of Peter, in which the Apostle urges Christians to be "always ready to give an answer to anyone who asks them the reason for their hope." It is an impulse in which Francis identifies three typical messages of Christian communication: to be able to "see the shreds of goodness hidden even when all seems lost", to be able to echo the beauty of God's love and its newness, to be able to communicate with "gentleness". I dream, Francis adds, of "a communication that does not sell illusions and fears, but is able to give reasons for hope". To achieve this, the Pope suggests, "we must cure ourselves of the diseases that are protagonism and self-referentiality, avoiding the risk of talking over one another".

Stories of hope

Pope Francis concludes by placing communication in a Jubilee dimension, densely packed with "social implications", and proposes that we resort to "stories imbued with hope", to those "stories of goodness" that need to be "discovered and told" by following them "between the folds of the daily news". "It is good," he concludes, "to find these germs of hope and make them known. It helps the world to be a little less deaf to the cries of the latter, a little less indifferent, a little less closed."

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