Open Reflections

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Sailing the digital sea

The present time is experiencing an enormous expansion of the frontiers of communication, bringing about an unheard of convergence among the different media and making interactivity possible. The internet is therefore revealing a vocation that is open, basically egalitarian and pluralist but at the same time it is creating a new boundary: indeed, people are talking about the digital divide.
This divide separates the included from the excluded and adds to the other discrepancies that are already distancing nations from one another and dividing them from within. The dangers of standardisation and control, of intellectual and moral relativism, already clearly recognisable in the erosion of the critical spirit, the subordination of truth to the play of opinions, the multiple forms of degradation and humiliation of the person’s intimacy. We are therefore witnessing a “pollution of the spirit; it makes us smile less, makes our faces gloomier, less likely to greet each other or look each other in the eye”

 Love of truth is “a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalised” . The media can become factors of humanisation, “not only when, thanks to their technological development, they increase the possibilities of communicating information, but above all when they are geared towards a vision of the person and the common good that reflects truly universal values”. This requires that they “focus on promoting the dignity of persons and peoples, they need to be clearly inspired by charity and placed at the service of truth, of the good, and of natural and supernatural fraternity”.

Let us set sail on the digital sea fearlessly, confronting open navigation with the same enthusiasm that has steered the Barque of the Church for 2,000 years. Rather than for technical resources, although these are necessary, let us also qualify ourselves by dwelling in this world with a believing heart that helps to give a soul to the ceaseless flow of communications that makes up the web.

 Rather than for technical resources, although these are necessary, let us also qualify ourselves by dwelling in this world with a believing heart that helps to give a soul to the ceaseless flow of communications that makes up the web.

This is our mission, the inalienable mission of the Church. Every believer who works in the media has a “special responsibility for opening the door to new forms of encounter, maintaining the quality of human interaction and showing concern for individuals and their genuine spiritual needs. They can thus help the men and women of our digital age to sense the Lord’s presence”

(Benedict XVI, at “Digital Witnesses. Faces and languages in the cross-media age@ Congress, 24/04/2010

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The Church’s vision of the human person is a fundamental starting point for not only our spiritual progress but also for our cultural identity and justification.

In previous blogs we have systematically referred to various stages in the Global History where the Church’s catalytic role for the betterment of the life of the individual and that of the society has been demonstrated. 

Good examples are the building of Hospitals in every city which is also an Episcopal see (i.e. where there is a Bishop), and the founding of the Universities.

The Church encouraged and protected learning.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the Church’s teaching defending the human person, his dignity and his freedom of conscience has sown the seed for bold intellectual explorations and has, indirectly, led to the emergence of the individual national states; the national states have not come into being as a reaction to the unified world of the Middle Ages, bur rather  as an expression of “freedom” and individual and collective assertion in the constant strife for a better world of freedom and brotherhood. 

The Catholic University

 Only by constantly striving for a higher synthesis of knowledge can one hope to satisfy the thirst for true wisdom which is so deeply inscribed in the human heart.

 It is within this context that the Catholic university has its proper role. The Catholic university is of course called upon to engage in high quality research and teaching. But precisely because it is “Catholic”, the recognition it gives to man’s religious dimension in the search for truth is irrevocably joined to a concrete profession of faith. The task of learning and teaching is guided by the light of the Church’s faith.

What does it mean to say that a Catholic university should be guided by faith in Christ? It means that the university as an institution is committed to the belief that Jesus Christ has revealed the truth about God and that in doing so he has definitively revealed the fundamental dignity of each and every human person (Gaudium et Spes, 22), regardless of how good or intelligent or useful others may consider that person to be.

The Catholic university’s commitment to higher education, then, is in fact a commitment to man himself and to the development of all that is truly human. It is for this reason that the Church has always supported the growth and development of institutions of higher learning. She wishes the dignity of the person to be affirmed, human rights and freedoms to be defended and promoted, justice and a social order marked by fellowship and mutual respect to be everywhere fostered. She wishes, in a word, to serve the people of society by proclaiming the sublime dignity of the human person, a truth that she herself has learned at the school of the Gospel.. As an institution, the Catholic university has a specific vocation within the Church. Here I would address in a particular way the Catholics within the university community. Dear brothers and sisters: you are called to build bridges between the world of knowledge and the world of faith. Through your witness of faith, you help the Church to fulfil her prophetic function in society, which is to purify and elevate all human activity through the light and power of the Gospel. The Church in no way rejects whatever is authentically human and true in given cultures, for she knows that contact with the Gospel will bring them to a more complete and fruitful realization (Gaudium et Spes, 58).

John-Paul II, Jakarta, 12/10/1989

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