In his final address at the National Days of Social Communication, held at Fatima on 27-28 September, on the question “Is what we see, hear and read true?”, Bishop Manuel Clemente of Porto maintained that “Catholic social communication must privilege skill rather than emotion and depth rather than superficiality: we aren’t selling anything to anyone, not even if we are subjected to pressure by the public”. “A truly Christian and humanist form of communication must show itself attentive, concerned to furnish explanations and, if necessary, denounce measures that infringe the general and individual religious freedom that it considers a fundamental value”. Referring indirectly to some government legislation, the bishop criticised “the uninviting time slots allocated to religious education in schools, the idea that the cost of non-state education should be borne entirely by families, the obligation of prison inmates to make a formal application to be able to benefit from religious counselling, and, more generally, the attempt to downgrade confessional initiatives of solidarity”. In his role as chairman of the bishops’ committee of social communication, Monsignor Clemente said he was contrary to any purely formal or ideological theorization that considered society as a mere agglomerate of individual entities: “the secular state is not guaranteed by abstract opinions and motivations of citizens, but by strengthening respective powers and responsibilities in the public sphere, and by guaranteeing the rights of minorities”. “In response to a society characterized by a profound lack of hope, Christian social communication must not abdicate from politics, or from culture”. “The Church must keep at once a contemplative, active and constructive eye on reality. It must be able to bring together a multiplicity of views and to unify perspectives, in constant reference to the human person and his/her individual and social realization”.
