Pope Benedict XVI: Believers Should Contribute to Digital Culture

In an address to the participants in the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications on February 28, Pope Benedict XVI talked about the ‘digital culture’ and about the need for the Church to learn how to speak of the Kingdom of God in new media.

We have compiled a summary of the most important parts of his address.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In this year’s message for the World Day of Social Communications, I invited all to reflect on the fact that new technologies have not only changed the way of communicating, but are carrying out a vast cultural transformation. A new way of learning and thinking is being carried out, with unheard of opportunities to establish relationships and to build communion.

The new languages being developed in digital communication determine [..] a more intuitive and emotive than analytical capacity, they orient toward a logical organization of thought and of the relationship with reality, often privileging the image and hyper-textual connections.

Moreover, the clear traditional distinction between the written and oral language seems to vanish in favor of a written communication that takes the form and immediacy of oral communication.

The dynamics proper to the “participatory networks” require, moreover, that the person be involved in what he communicates. When persons exchange information, they are already sharing themselves and their vision of the world: they become “witnesses” of what gives meaning to their existence.

The risks that are run are certainly far from everyone’s eyes: the loss of interiority, superficiality in living relationships, the flight to the emotive nature, the prevalence of the most convincing opinion in regard to the desire for truth.

The digital culture poses new challenges to our capacity to speak and to listen to a symbolic language that speaks of transcendence. In the proclamation of the Kingdom, Jesus himself was able to use the elements of the culture and the environment of his time: the flock, the fields, the banquet, the seeds, etc. Today we are called to discover, also in the digital culture, significant symbols and metaphors for persons, which can be of help when speaking of the Kingdom of God to contemporary man.

We must consider also that communication in the times of the “new means of communication” entails an ever narrower and ordinary relationship between man and machines, from computers to mobile telephones, to mention only the most common. What will be the effects of this constant relationship?

It is [..] the appeal to spiritual values which will make it possible to promote a truly human communication: beyond all enthusiasm or easy skepticism, we know that this is an answer to the call imprinted on our nature of beings created in the image and likeness of God in communion.

[..] The contribution of believers could be of help for the world of the media itself, opening horizons of meaning and value that the digital culture is not capable to perceive and represent on its own.

You can read the full translation of the Pope’s text here: http://www.zenit.org/article-31877?l=english