The "next door" press” “

The general assembly of the National Federation of the Local Christian Press (FNPL), an umbrella organization representing fourteen associations aimed at promoting the parish and diocesan press, was held in recent weeks at Rennes, in Brittany. A “next door” press, very diversified in character, the parish press now reaches several million readers in France today and calls on the services of numerous volunteers. According to the director of the Seminary of Lilles and president of FNPL, Father Bernard Podvin , the parish paper is a “means of communion”; nonetheless “the irradiation of the local Christian press is often unrecognized”, in spite of the fact that “there are now over 1500 parish papers and magazines in France with an overall annual print run of 23 million copies”. A great but vulnerable mission. The publications in question “perhaps don’t arouse any great ‘media stir’,” explains Father Podvin, “but they are at the service of Christian communities, help to ensure their vitality” and “represent an extraordinary social and ecclesial network”. Each is different in kind because linked to the specific “pastoral needs, editorial strategies and financial resources” of very different local situations, both “rural and urban. The parish press must – he said – “honour what was said by John Paul II in his exhortation on the mission of the laity: ‘If the parish is the Church placed in the neighbourhoods of humanity, it lives and is at work through being deeply inserted in human society and intimately bound up with its aspirations and its dramatic events’ (no. 27)”. It is just in what the Pope calls the role of the parish as “a house of welcome to all” or, as John XIII put it, as a “village fountain” at which all may quench their thirst, that the FNPLC finds its mission of being “publications proposed by parish communities to public opinion. At the present time, in which an urgent need is felt, in the Church as in society, for closer communion and a willingness to listen, the local paper offers visibility and resonance to this mission at once great and vulnerable”. “Giving a mouthpiece” to ordinary people. According to Father Podvin, three conditions for a local press that operates “in the name of the Gospel” need to be met. The first is that of “telling the mystery of the faith to our contemporaries in a language that can be ‘heard'”; that means ensuring “the quality of its content and form”. The second is “reaching ordinary people who often will find no ‘serious’ reading matter in their post boxes other than the parish paper. “They must be accurately informed. They need to be given a mouthpiece”, he adds. And the third condition is “testifying, as the Council says, that the joy and hope, the grief and anguish, of man in our time are those of the disciples of Christ. Nothing that is human can be alien to them”. The written word still has a future “Thank God – observes Father Podvin – no one medium monopolises social and religious communication. The written word still maintains its place and its mission among the various media”, with its ability to “promote reflection and detachment amid the cacophony of the media”. A further point in its favour is the fact that it appears at longer intervals than other media: this saves it “from the stress of the immediate and from the pitfalls of the superficial and the ephemeral”. Combining “professionalism with apostolic inspiration – the one cannot survive without the other – parish papers may contribute to the proclamation of the Gospel by placing themselves at the service of man”. Poupard is convinced of this, on condition that “public opinion” may find in this press “the sign of a welcoming and missionary Church, capable both of comprehending the reality of our times and being faithful to the Gospel message”: an “apostolic concern that must – he concludes – form part of the formation of future priests”.