social comunications" "
“Communication and Mission” is the title of the handbook on social communications in the mission of the Church, approved in recent days by the Italian bishops who were meeting in the Vatican for their 53rd General Assembly. “Having reached its final draft after a long and complex drafting process”, explained Archbishop Francesco Cacucci of Bari-Bitonto, chairman of the Episcopal Commission for culture and social communications, “the handbook provides a specific tool for pastoral application, with information also of operational character, as well as general guidelines traced by the pastoral plans for the decade 2001-2010 and prospects opened by the cultural project” of the Italian Church. “The diffusion of the media and their pervasive presence now affect all the fields of the Church’s ministry”, said Archbishop Cacucci. That’s why the Church must “offer precise criteria of discernment” and “suggest how the many opportunities offered by the new culture of the media may best be used”. The aim of the handbook, says its introduction, is to “offer the whole community of the Italian Church a structured, and in some sense normative, picture of the contents and perspectives from which to start out to realise a pastoral programme that may consider social communications not as a specific sector but as an essential dimension” of the Church’s ministry”. The aim should be to propose “a change in the mentality and commitment of all Christians… so that the inculturation of the Gospel in the various languages of the media may make the media themselves ever more capable of transmitting the gospel message”. The document is aimed at members of the ecclesial community, pastoral leaders, and in particular those who operate in the fields of communication and culture, the professionals of the Catholic media. The objective: “to develop skills relating to the knowledge, discernment and utilization of the media for the mission of the Church” by offering “a common platform for the pastoral plans that each diocese is called to realise”.
