To celebrate World Communications Day this Sunday, 17 May, the e-Record looks at the speech by Archbishop Claudio Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, who spoke at the recent Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Communications Congress.
Your theme, What is our voice?, takes us directly to one of the key challenges for the Church today. How are we to speak of God, of Jesus? How are we to witness to His presence in a world that is changing rapidly? Can we find the voice that will most effectively proclaim God’s love for all? Our voice must express the freedom, joy and hope that comes from being unconditionally loved by Christ, if we are to touch the hearts and change the minds of the people around us. Your focus on the voice reminds us that communication is essentially a human responsibility rather than a technical achievement. An authentic voice must speak from the heart; out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
This morning, I was present at the lecture of music, and it was reminding me of a famous poem of a Latin American author: he is talking about a man who was playing songs and guitar in the villages, and he was invited by the people to play and sing. One evening, some bandits took him, beat him, left him half dead in the road, stole his guitar. The morning after, people encountered him half dead on the road. They asked him: what happened to you? He said some bandits last night stole my guitar, my donkey, but they couldn’t steal the music from my heart.
This afternoon, I want to make this the point of my talk. What is the music that we have in our heart? Because this is the point of reference of our communication. We can have no donkey, we can lose our guitar, and you know what I mean, but if we have no music in our heart, our communication is void. And so, this afternoon, the first question is exactly this. I am working in the field of communication, what is the music that I have in my heart?
When we think about the changes in communication – what some call the digital revolution – it is natural to focus on the technological developments.
We are fascinated with which communication devices are becoming more powerful, smaller, more connected and accessible. While this focus is understandable, the truth is that the most profound change is not technological, but cultural. The real challenge is to appreciate how much is changing in the ways that people, especially young people, are gathering information, are being educated, are expressing themselves, are forming relationships and communities.
In 2012, Pope Benedict insisted that the new technologies are not only changing the ways we communicate but communication itself.
The digital culture is permeating through all the different aspects of people’s lives. It is changing our world and it requires that all established institutions, political, commercial and social, rethink the way in which they will interact with the groups and the individuals they wish to engage. These changes, moreover, are not just happening outside the Church but within our communities and in the everyday experience of believers.
Many of those who come to our churches today, or who are looking at us from outside, come with perceptions, expectations, and a sense of identity that have been shaped by social media. It is obvious that the Church must be attentive to its own theological insights, to its own sense of who and what we are, as it seeks to establish criteria for its engagement with social media.
We cannot rely exclusively on the insights of sociologists and media gurus, no matter how valid their perceptions, as we seek to develop a strategy for our communications ministry. We must always begin with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and seek to find ways of expressing to our contemporaries the ever relevant truth of God’s unconditional love for all people.
But, as Pope Benedict instructed the pontifical council,
It is not a matter of expressing the Gospel message in contemporary language. It is also necessary to have the courage to think more deeply, as happened in other epochs — about the relationship between faith, the life of the Church and the changes human beings are experiencing.
What challenges does digital thought pose to faith and technology, what questions and requests? This is not a new challenge. The first apostles had to find ways of expressing their faith which was rooted in the language and thought of Judaism. In a Greco-Roman world which was radically different, its ways of thinking and its public discourse.
The great achievement of St Paul was to find ways of faithfully expressing the essence of faith, the Kerygmatic (9:29) nucleus of the Gospels, using language and categories that made sense for people who lived in a world that was very different to the world of Judaism, where Jesus lived. There is reflection in this field of Pope Benedict, analysing how today we are understanding the cultural new technologies; to express our faith in this kind of language that our people are understanding today.
I remember when we started with the Twitter experience. I remember the reaction of some young people. They told me, “It is the first time the Pope is talking in our language”. Interesting. We recognise that there was an effort on the side of the Pope to talk in a language that young people especially could understand.
Church and communication
I believe it is essential that the Church give more attention to communication.
When we talk about the communicative mission of the Church, we are not talking about one mission among many others.
Some bishops think that their communicative mission is to simply open an office of communications, or to just have a spokesperson: I don’t think this is the real sense of communication today. It’s not just to have an office.
The Church exists by the will of God and it exists to communicate Jesus Christ and communicate His good news to all. From the beginning, this has been its universal mission. We are called to bring the good news to the ends of the world, to ensure that the Gospel reaches and touches people in every part of the world.
This message with which we have been entrusted is a person, is Jesus Christ: what music have we in our heart, and our music is a person. We invite others not merely to know about a historical man named James, but to enter into a personal relationship with Him. We don’t ask people to become members of a sect or an ideological movement, but to join in community with others who have been called by Christ to recognise and celebrate His presence among us.
Good communication is never simply about the exchange of information, but about the creation of relations, a truth that is becoming even more verifiable in the realm of social media. Today, when we speak of the ends of the earth, we must remember the so-called digital continent. Benedict said in his message for World Communication Day 2013, “the digital environment is not a parallel or purely virtual world, but is part of the daily experience of many people, especially the young”. For them, digital devices are not primarily instruments to be used, but are part of the fabric of their lives. The connectivity facilitated by these devices has reshaped their existential environment and enabled them to live their lives in the context of networks and patterns of friendship associations, and community that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
If the Church is not present, and does not share the good news in this forum, then we risk becoming marginal to the lives of many, and are failing in our mission to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Our focus cannot be on self-promotion but, rather, on witnessing the free gift that is God’s love and concern for all. Our enthusiasm and conviction, if genuine, will spread to others. We must be careful, however, that we are not perceived as another marketing organisation seeking to advertise and sell itself for its own self-perpetuation.
Sometimes, when I’m considering plans about that, I think of what Pope Francis said (recalling Pope Benedict): “the Church is growing by attraction, not by proselytising. Attraction. Which means we need witnesses. Communication is also at the heart of our daily lives, the Church as a community is a gathering of those who are being called together by Christ”. Our ecclesia cannot flourish, it cannot be a place of communion and belonging if we do not foster those forms of communication that promote a sense of connection and communication.
We must learn to appreciate the potential of social media to ensure that people are being listened to, consoled by, engaged with, and valued by the Church and its pastors. This is not just a question of customer relations or marketing, but of ensuring that the Church can give witness and a voice to the faith of the whole people of God, gathered together by Christ. Our radical structures will be credible if those in leadership are seen to be listening and responding to the voices of the faithful in the light of the Gospel.
This is a big challenge for us bishops also. In our vision, we are teachers, pastors, accustomed that people have to listen to us. And now the new technologies are changing the perspective. We have to listen. And to have a respectful dialogue with everybody. The Church does not only communicate through those formal means with which we are most familiar. Our communication is not confined to pulpits, radio, TV, newspapers, internet. We are reaching these means but we communicate in every aspect of our lives. Communication is also a fundamental aspect of our liturgies, our celebrations: why celebrate the Eucharist? I am accustomed to say this in a very rough way, I know, but a waiter in a restaurant has more dignity than a priest distributing Holy Communion. More dignity. People know how I celebrate the Eucharist, what faith I have in my heart, what music.
Communication is affected by how we live our faith, run our schools and hospitals, treat the poor, the vulnerable, the least among us. Often, the most important communication is the strength of our witness to the good news; our testimony renders it believable and welcome in the lives of others or not. It is our lives, our liturgy, our approach to people that speaks most loudly, for better or for worse. Social media allows us to see ourselves as others see us. If we are attentive to the comments, criticism, observations and questions of those who visit our sites and engage with our postings, we can learn much about how we are perceived. We need to understand better how our message is being heard and understood, and how we are seen by different audiences. We have to always focus on the content of our teachings, and rightly so. Today, we must listen more attentively to our audience or multiple audiences and understand their concerns and questions. We need to understand better and take account of the context and environments in which they will encounter us.
We will only find our voice if we begin with listening. If we are not to turn into the voices with whom we wish to converse, we will come across tone deaf and our voice will be ignored.
A full copy of the speech of Archbishop Celli is available here: http://mediablog.catholic.org.au/?p=3981#more-3981.