ROME. The Church has always proclaimed the Gospel through the channels active in a precise historical moment. It is easy to find the equivalent of current tweets and posts in the history of evangelism. Forms of innovative language, in fact, are by no means extraneous to the proclamation of the Gospel. It won’t be tweets, posts or blogs because the sign of the cross or the ringing of bells are obviously much more than a flash mob and a trill. But they anticipate its shape, recall the mystery and still last. After all, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Therefore, listen with the ear of the heart. This is where the theme of the Communication Festival inspired by the message of Pope Francis comes into play. “One senses a great question that is both cultural and educational because every technological change also produces an anthropological change – underlines the Pope -. We need to clarify the links between the new digital language that is replacing analog and the lives of our children, adolescents, young people, adults and the elderly”.
Innovative communication
The Church speaks the current language of social media: in recent history when Benedict XVI inaugurated his presence on Twitter from the screen of an iPad, opening eight accounts in as many languages, which was added shortly after that in Latin. The mass media linked that event to the gesture of Pius XI, who in 1931 from the microphones of Vatican Radio launched his first radio message and, even earlier, the blessing impressed by Leo XIII in 1896 on the film by the Lumière brothers. The cinema film and the microphone of a radio on one side and an iPad open on a social network on the other, constitute different forms of communication corresponding to almost two eras but, as the radio has represented the transmission of wide-ranging information, so Twitter represents connective and shared knowledge, responding to today’s active way of communicating.
Festival
The Communication Festival, hosted from 21 to 29 May by the bishop of Rieti, Domenico Pompili, president of the Episcopal Commission for culture and social communications, will be preceded by a cycle of events all dedicated to children, adolescents and their families. We will talk about how to use social networks correctly, but there will also be events dedicated to the little ones that will leverage physical experience.
(R)digital evolution
Digital (R)evolution: here is the Communication Festival. The presentation of the Communication Festival in Rieti started from the “why”. The national event promoted by the Pauline men and women is being held this year by the diocese of Rieti and it was Bishop Domenico Pompili who explained the reasons for it in the Varrone Auditorium. To an audience made up of citizens, communication operators and institutional figures, the prelate indicated the prospect of increasing awareness of the media landscape in which we live: a mixed environment, in which everyone is with one foot online and one foot offline . A situation that “is redesigning our daily lives with disruptive effects in interpersonal relationships, in individual conscience, in economic and social dynamics, in spiritual experience itself”, said the bishop, evoking the risk of being conditioned by algorithms.
Events
The events of the Communication Festival intend to involve citizens at various levels and attract communication operators from all over Italy, enhancing the distinctive features of the territory with the intention of promoting knowledge of its beauties and its history, leveraging on the Franciscan heart of Valle Santa and on the characteristics of its villages and its natural landscape. All without forgetting to keep a spotlight on the issues of reconstruction following the 2016 earthquake. All events will be free and open to the public without reservations while seats last. The dense intervention of Father Paolo Benanti started from the relationship between the generations, called to deepen the line traced by Monsignor Pompili. The Franciscan friar, an expert in digital technologies, artificial intelligence and innovation management, began his speech with a simple observation: «The direction of information has reversed, once it was the elderly master who taught young people the trade, today it is the grandchildren who teach the grandparents how to use the tablet». A reversal that questions us and places us before enormous choices and challenges with respect to which the Festival can be a stimulus to open up, to transform innovation into development, “putting man at the centre”, somewhat as happened in the Renaissance.
Human wealth
Sr. Cristina Beffa, who came to Rieti to represent the Pauline men and women, referred to precisely this human richness. In telling the story of the Festival, you traced the reasons back to the need to shine a light on the Pope’s message to help people reflect on communication. And this year’s theme, with her invitation to open your heart and listen to others, makes the primary chords of communication and humanity vibrate together. Sr. Cristina was also entrusted with the task of explaining the working method of the Festival, with the effort to reach the result through various initiatives and various languages, promoting creativity, encounter, solidarity. Among the figures involved in the Communication Festival, the founder of Libera, don Luigi Ciotti; the president of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini; the linguist Luca Serianni; the plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso; the sociologist Chiara Giaccardi. Among the journalists, Lucia Annunziata (Half an hour more, Rai3), Enrico Mentana (director of Tg La7), Giovanni Grasso (director of the press office of the Presidency of the Republic), Paolo Ruffini (prefect of the Dicastery for communication of the Holy See ), David Puente (deputy director of Open.online) and Marco Tarquinio (director of Avvenire).
Language
A Church that knows how to surprise exists: not only lessons with liturgies but also mass media communication and online practices for communicating. The heart is always the Good News, the Gospel. The Announcement runs, is present, but precisely because of its living and life-giving nature it cannot remain a letter, it must become closeness, encounter, dialogue. In a tag cloud, that kind of graphic cloud where the size of the written words is proportional to their recurrence, these would be the key words of Francis’ pontificate: proximity, encounter, dialogue. At the center of communication, the people who communicate are in a strong relationship with each other. And so while social attention, strongly favored by technological innovation, has by now moved from the medium to the message, many, too many and often, in Pope Francis the need to always establish a relationship remains marked, in any communicative context because the message asserts itself with authenticity and effectiveness. It will not be strictly social, but the ability to make a sort of teaching in the air is innovative and clearly visible in Francis. The reference is to the meeting on the plane with journalists, in his travels abroad, which turned into a real exercise of the magisterium, with demanding and rather explicit declarations; but also to the constant reminders to his ministers, in reviewing the long homilies and the limits of ecclesiastical communication as a whole: if the Son of God, the Word of the living God, became flesh, he can only have come to seek and save (involve) what was lost (Lk 19:10).
