Using new media
If God had delayed the incarnation for 2000 years, by what means would Jesus have proclaimed his message of redemption and the Kingdom of God? How would St Paul, that supreme communicator, have spread the Good News?
The Church in Southern Africa observes Social Communications Sunday on September 5 — this year, suitably, on the anniversary of the death of another great communicator, Mother Teresa. On this day, the Church turns its mind to the way in which it preaches.
In his annual message for World Communication Sunday (of which Social Communications Sunday is the local variant), Pope Benedict quotes St Paul: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel.”
The Gospel is preached in many different ways. The priest’s homily at Sunday Mass is the most obvious example. We may even proclaim the Gospel without saying a word, by deed and by example.
Our evangelisation efforts require individual contact. But, as St Paul knew when he wrote his letters to Christian communities and as the evangelists acknowledged when they put down the gospels, the Good News and all that is associated with it (even the disagreeable, as we read in various passages in the New Testament) need a broader audience too.
For this reason, Pope Benedict this year encourages priests in particular to make use of the exciting, and perhaps daunting, opportunities presented by modern methods of communication.
The pope wants a clergy that is at home in the digital world. “Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelisation and catechesis,” he wrote. In doing so, they should reach out “to those who do not believe, the disheartened, and those who have a deep, unarticulated desire for enduring truth and the absolute”.
Doing so in creative ways may involve having to take risks, of course. Outside delivering their homilies, many priests are cautious about making statements in public because they fear being misunderstood, misquoted, appearing inarticulate or otherwise being open to rebuke. Clearly, communicating with the public is not a suitable vocation for every priest. Some will have talents best employed in other fields.
But for those with a faculty (and, of course, the time) to write a blog or engage with people on Facebook, the new media can be a most fertile mission field. It may even be a way of promoting vocations by increasing the visibility of the clergy and presenting the priesthood as an affirming life choice at a time when many Catholics see their priests only at Mass.
But the public engagement of priests also requires tolerance on the part of the Catholic community. If we do not like the way a priest evangelises on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, or disagree with his blogging approaches, he must not be discouraged by denouncements and ugly criticisms. When priests (or, of course, religious sisters and brothers) reach out by innovative means, they should be commended and encouraged—and, if needed, engaged with constructively.
It is perfectly conceivable that Jesus today might use YouTube videos to teach the multitudes, or engage with modern-day Pharisees on blogs. And St Paul might well use Facebook to let the Corinthians know how he feels about their squabbles—and at the same time inform the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians and Romans of his concerns
and joys.
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