More than a decade before he was elected and addressed the media as pontiff, Pope Leo XIV had spoken about evangelization amid modern media in an address that is still accessible, a Vatican expert spotlighted this week.
In 2012, then-Father Robert Prevost gave an address at a Synod about evangelization convened by Pope Benedict XVI, Sandro Magister explained in a May 13 article for his blog. The address considers how several Church Fathers responded to the non- and anti-Christian media of their time, which in turn provides insight for evangelizing amid the present-day’s media culture.
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Magister described then-Fr. Prevost’s remarks as “astonishing, for the acuteness of the diagnosis of the mediatic distortions of today’s society, but even more for the reference to the Fathers of the Church — from Augustine to Ambrose and Leo the Great to Gregory of Nyssa — as teachers brilliant in taking up the challenges of communication of their time, and therefore in understanding how to best evangelize the society of the late empire.”
In his address during the 2012 Synod on Evangelization, then-Fr. Prevost said that mass media in the West “is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel; for example, abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.”
Mass media may be tolerant of religion when the latter does not directly contradict the media’s positions on ethical problems, but if religious leaders do speak out, the media label their messages “as ideological and insensitive in regard to the so-called vital needs of people in the contemporary world,” he said.
In order to effectively evangelize against media-created ethical falsehoods, catechists and religious leaders need to develop better understanding of laboring amid the current media climate, he urged.
Church Fathers were successful in evangelizing “in great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived,” then-Fr. Prevost said. “Consequently, they understood with enormous precision the techniques through which popular religious and ethical imaginations of their day were manipulated by the centers of secular power in that world.”
Magister shared the full text of the address, which can be accessed here.
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
