Accepting the risk of erring ” “

“The Catholic Church is ever conscious that recounting the experience of faith with the language of the media may enrich each and everyone. Accustomed to express herself in writing and through fixed images, she has never turned her back on the challenge of the media, indeed, by recalling her own heritage, she has always tried to offer an original contribution to social communication”. That’s how Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth (England) and president of the European Episcopal Committee for the media (EECM), opened the meeting on “Communicating the faith in the culture of the media in Europe” at Aix en Provence (19-23 September). Without concealing difficulties and misunderstandings, we therefore need – he said – to take note that “since the culture of the media is responsive to the witness of faith, especially when it is expressed in gestures of solidarity”, it is now possible “to help this same culture to turn the image not into a fiction that substitutes reality, but into a way to reach the truth”. “The media are no longer in society, they are society: today they don’t register the temperature, but determine it, and the Church, by acknowledging this fact, must come to terms with their laws and rules, not to submit to them but to grasp opportunities for communicating the Christian message”. Cardinal Godfried Danneels, archbishop of Malines-Bruxelles, urged that a widespread inferiority complex be overcome. He recalled that “if Catholics are a minority that, at times, fails to be recognized, they know they are sustained by the Word and in this find the strength and the serenity to speak out without feeling victimized”. This consciousness leads them to “be present in the media with the culture of dialogue rather than with that of affirmation. They know that in such moments they are called not to convert but to offer words of faith and of hope. They must be willing to run the risk of erring rather than remaining silent: they must bear witness to the freshness of the faith and always tell the truth”. “The world in which we live is a media sphere, a world that fascinates people – added Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris – a world that takes time and demands intellectual and psychological energies from children, young people, adults and the elderly. The fascination of that world, however, is not contemplation, reflection, study, and here the question is posed of the presence in the media of witnesses of faith: strong personalities who may run the risk of being fascinating but not always wholly understood in their radical choices”. However, it is not only witnesses that the Church must offer, because “on us Catholics is incumbent the task of being alert to the ‘breaking points’ of human experience (life, death, suffering, celebration, violence…) to say words that, through the media, may help people to seek and find ‘other’ replies”. The power of the media, old and new, poses anew the question of education. “The Church’s attention to the media and their language – pointed out Archbishop Francesco Cacucci of Bari and president of the Italian Episcopal Conference’s Commission for social communications – must be combined with a stronger and more widespread cultural and educational commitment, an effort of forming people’s consciences. We cannot completely delegate to the media so important a task which is especially incumbent on the family, the school, the parish, the associations… What’s needed is a dialogue, or better a pact, between media, culture and education”. The challenges that the mass media pose to the Church – said Msgr. Peter Henrici, auxiliary bishop of Chur-Zurich, to whom the task of drawing the conclusions of the meeting was given – also include that of language (so that the words and symbols of the Church be made comprehensible), the capacity for communication (through experience), and a new inculturation of the faith (dialogue between life and Gospel that presents itself as a “new incarnation”). But – he said – we must never forget that “faith can be recounted and communicated, but not transmitted, through the mass media, because the presupposition of the experience of faith still remains, now as ever, the personal meeting with Christ”.