A language that surprises” “

“Media-based society”: a new culture is rapidly being established throughout Europe, insensible to the most important contributions made by Christianity to European culture. It’s this cultural rupture that the European bishops responsible for the mass media tried to assess, at their meeting in Aix-en-Provence from 19 to 22 September (cf. page 2). Although the media are not the only source of this new culture, they play a central role in it: they legitimize it by reflecting it and reinforce it by diffusing it. Now, speaking of a new culture means for the Church the need to inculturate the Gospel, i.e. to try to embody the faith in this culture to enable the fruits of the Spirit to be recognized in it, and at the same time to try to humanize and challenge it, in short, to redeem it. That’s the basic problem that the Church needs to address today. So no condemnation of the media (habitual for many Christians), but rather a decisive change already implicit in the title of the Meeting: in proposing to “communicate” the faith “in” media-based society, the primary objective is not “to preach” the faith “through” the media, in an exploitative manner that has widely shown its limitations. Participants of present-day culture, the media are not suitable to transmit the objective faith; they are not possible channels for such a transmission. In compensation, it is possible to “communicate” subjective faith through the media, the more so since culture and communication now coincide. But two fundamental conditions need to be met: first, one of the laws of this media-based society is that the best way of communicating a message is through “witnesses” who personally commit themselves. This is a favourable circumstance for Christianity, based ever since its origins on personal “witness”, first that of Jesus, then of the Apostles and lastly of Christians as a whole. In the pluralist and democratic European society of our time, moreover, the method of witness enables us to express our convictions, while simultaneously dialoguing with the other currents of society. For media-based society does not signal merely the advent of a new culture but also the end of the regime of Christendom in which the Church acted through the structures of power. The second condition for the inculturation of the faith in media-based society is connected with language. From the (sociological) point of view of the relation with the Church, Europe’s population may be divided into three groups. A first group, ever more in the minority, is that of convinced Christians, familiar with the traditional language in use within the Church. It is to them that the Christian media are primarily addressed (though not without first ensuring that this traditional language is still intelligibile to the younger generations and the populace at large). A second group, the most numerous in Europe, has lost all the usual relations with the Church as an institution and often with Christian culture too, though at the same time remaining responsive to the religious or spiritual dimension of life. Communicating the faith to them presupposes speaking about it using the language of human experience with the strongest and most eloquent words. For the Christian media (in particular those aimed at the general public), the difficulty will then be to know when to use the traditional, and when the less conventional language, understandable to everyone, believers or not. Lastly comes the third group which especially comprises the young, university students and workers: those who show no interest in religious questions at all. For this group the often negative image they have of the Church needs to be rectified: they need to be surprised with a language new to them on questions of society that may interest them. But if there is just one conclusion to be drawn from this meeting, it is that it has reminded us of the basic condition of every word of faith, even in a media-based society: since we need above all to “speak to the heart”, we must first learn how to hold our tongue, how to listen with attention, respect and friendship to what springs spontaneously from the hearts of our contemporaries.