Though we are in an age of communication, there is growing incommunicability among people, says the preacher of the Pontifical Household.
Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa says that using communication media to evangelize can help resolve the negative aspects related to the communication world. In this interview with ZENIT, he speaks of the problems caused by media and the secret for Catholics trying to help.
Q: What is your perception of mass media today?
Father Cantalamessa: The characteristic of our day and age, its most brilliant achievement and success, is information, in other words, mass communication: the press, cinema, television, Internet, cellphones.
Mass media are the great protagonists of the moment. Anyone can, at any time of day or night, find out what is going on in the world and establish direct contact with someone else at any point of the globe. All this is a sign of great progress and we ought to be grateful to God for the technology which has made it possible. However, there are serious dangers and negative aspects involved in social communications today.
Q; What exactly do you have in mind?
Father Cantalamessa: The means of communication are consumerist, in the sense that they encourage people to consume, and they are consumed and come to an end in themselves. Communication media are exclusively horizontal. People exchange their news items and, since we are ephemeral and transitory beings, news is equally ephemeral. Each item cancels out the previous one.
Along with an increase in communications, there is a growing experience of incommunicability. Communications are limited to sounds, to rumors. Rumors assure us that we are not alone; however, there is a lack of vertical, creative communication, a total absence of others. Communication media become a mirror reflecting the image of human misery and the echo of human emptiness.
In short, modern communication media convey sadness. The media place far more stress on the evil and tragic side of the world than on the good and positive aspects.
As a high school history teacher living in Eastern Mass. where antique stores and libraries have newspapers and magazines back to the 1700’s, I love to read old newspapers (the mass media of their day) that are real old.
And it is interesting how much LESS negative they are compared with the constant barrage of negativism that is characteristic of the media today–especially in what they highlight and feature.
It is this “sadness” as the Franciscan friar described it, that is so horribly destructive in the long run.
A phrase of enormous power and suggestiveness: …”the echo of human emptiness…”
“The echo,” not merely emptiness but the echo thereof, the perishing shadow of a sound. One needs to think of this phrase and open its many meanings. What an excellent description of what media technology has done, and become. LM
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You don’t think this might have any relevance to T19? Glad anyway you haven’t been intimidated by overbearing and highly selective Elves.