Readers like to send me articles they think I should know about, often dealing with the press. One of the more unusual ones came this week from Tom Ryan in Eastham: Pope Francis’s message for the 59th World Day of Social Communications.
I am not a churchgoer. But in the paralyzed silence from political leaders that followed last week’s inauguration, it is striking that some of the strongest voices are coming from the pulpit. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington is a conspicuous example. (See Pastor Edgar Miranda’s op-ed essay in this week’s Independent.)
The Pope’s message, unlike the bishop’s, which was given to the president’s face, was directed at journalists. But it was just as pointed.
Francis spoke of disinformation and polarization and how “a few centers of power control an unprecedented mass of data and information.” Too often, he said, the powerful communicate “fear and despair, prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred,” using “false or artfully distorted information to send messages designed to agitate, provoke, or hurt.”
The Pope zeroed in on the ways our surrender to digital surveillance and social media has eroded our ability to make common cause. “By profiling us according to the logic of the market,” he said, digital systems “modify our perception of reality. As a result, we witness, often helplessly, a sort of atomization of interests that ends up undermining the foundations of our existence as community, our ability to join in the pursuit of the common good, to listen to one another and to understand each other’s point of view.”
What other leader in today’s headlines, executive orders, and political commentary is talking about the foundations of community or pursuit of the common good? Who is taking action against the supercharged tyranny of technology? Instead, we are bombarded by news of threats, retribution, deportation, AI, “cleaning out” Gaza, and “America First.”
Francis invites journalists to be “communicators of hope.” But he has few illusions about that being an easy assignment. He quotes the French writer Georges Bernanos: Hope is possible, he wrote, only for those “who have had the courage to despair of the illusions and lies in which they once found security…. Hope is a risk that must be taken. It is the risk of risks.”
One way for us to respond to the Pope’s invitation is to find and report hopeful stories. There is a palpable feeling of relief when we can convey news of young people racing to help a man who has fallen from the pier, or of a far-sighted plan to make Shank Painter Road more welcoming, or to restore life to an abused waterway.
But there is a different kind of hope in questioning what we have lost and asking what our values as a community are. Can we find hope in stories about the things that worry us, the things that have gone wrong? That would mean believing we can learn from our mistakes.
“Hope is always a community project,” says Francis. That’s a congregation I want to belong to.
