Church and media

“The relation between the Churches and the mass media needs as a matter of urgency to be developed in a complex historical period in which so much disinformation is being disseminated about the Church”, said Cardinal Péter Erdõ, President of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE) in his keynote address opening the meeting of press officers and spokespersons of the Bishops Conferences of Europe who met in the headquarters of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) in Rome from 11 to 14 June; the meeting was attended by 36 representatives from 23 countries. The next plenary assembly of the CCEE, due to be held at Esztergom-Budapest in Hungary from 30 September to 3 October, will be dedicated precisely to the relation between Church and media. To prepare for the meeting, the CCEE is conducting a survey to study the relation between the institutions of the Church and the world of the media. The Church and communication. The greatest responsibility of the Church is that of investing in formation. The point was underlined by the general secretary of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Giuseppe Betori, on meeting the participants at the meeting. According to Betori, the Church needs “persons who have developed critical capacity towards the media and can help transmit through the media an authentic image of the Church and not a mere mask of her as too often happens, also in Italy. This is both possible and actual, given that recent surveys show that 70% of Italians have an interest in and give recognition to the Church”. Marco Accorinti, social researcher of the National Research Council (CNR) and professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, spoke in turn on the processes of forming public opinion. The Church – he said – is an “agency of socialization” that plays “an important role in the transmission of knowledge, values, the attribution of meaning and the interpretation of events”. She thus fulfils “a priority task in forming public opinion”. For the Church, communicating means “addressing people, informing them, placing herself at their side, considering their problems and thus overcoming her own self-referential image”. Migrations and media. The phenomenon of immigration too must come to terms with the way in which it is treated in the mass media and by public opinion. Introducing the question, Father Gianromano Gnesotto, head of the Office of the Pastoral Care of Immigrants and Refugees in Italy (CEI Migrantes Foundation), stressed that “the mechanism of simplification has led journalism to place the emphasis on what strikes the collective imagination, treating immigration in an unbalanced way more as a ‘problem’ that as a phenomenon, and generating a sense of alarm and anxiety, with headlines of the type: ‘invasions’, ‘black wave advancing’, ‘rising tide’, ‘descent of the Slavs'” and so on. To remedy this situation the Italian National Press Federation has drawn up a charter of good practices, the so-called “Charter of Rome”, in which journalists are asked to “observe maximum attention in their treatment of information concerning” asylum-seekers, refugees, victims of trafficking and migrants. Two particular cases were presented during the meeting: that of the Netherlands, a country of immigration, and that of Ukraine, a country of emigration. With a presence of foreigners of around 19% of its population, Holland is having to come to terms with a “failed” integration, as a result of which many workers of the first generation continue not to speak Dutch. The main difficulty faced by the Ukrainian Church, on the other hand, is the direct result of the mass emigration of its inhabitants, especially women: namely, the presence of a growing number of children who are growing up without “fathers” or “mothers”. Difficulty of coming to terms with the complexity of the situation, love for controversy, and structural simplification in its version of the facts: the world of religions too – said Mario Marazziti, journalist and head of communications for the St. Egidio Community – is paying the price of communicators’ lack of knowledge of what is specific to the different religious worlds. A new strategy of communication. Very important for the spokespersons were their discussions with Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Press Room of the Holy See, Vatican Radio and the Vatican Television Centre; with Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, President of the Pontifical Council of Social Communications; with Father Bernardo Suate, director of “Signis Roma”; with the Italian Catholic TV channel Sat2000 and with the SIR/SirEurope press agency. These meetings – says a communiqué of the CCEE – were “aimed at intensifying and improving collaboration between the agencies of communication and the pastoral care of the media by the Church. It thus emerged that the growing complexity of the current media panorama, the so-called media-sphere, demands of the Church many-sided responses, harmonized at various levels. If the Church has already been present in the world of the media for a long time (with publications, radio, TV and internet sites), today she is having to revise her strategy of communication to make it more effective”.