Almost a month on from the election of the first Latin American pontiff,
the head of the Vatican’s Council for Social Communications says Pope
Francis is pioneering new ways of sharing the faith with people in and
outside the Christian Church.
Archbishop Claudio Celli travelled to
Santiago del Chile at the weekend for a conference on the challenges and
opportunities facing the Church in Latin America in our era of rapidly
developing digital technologies.
The conference, which opened on Monday
at the Catholic University of Chile, brings together some 400
communications specialists from across the continent.
At the heart of
the discussion, Archbishop Celli says, lies not just the question of how
to use the new technologies, but rather of how to bring the Word of
Christ to men and women living in an increasingly digitalized world. The
new Pope, he says, is already showing us an innovative approach to
communicating that Gospel message…
“The
Church in Latin America is facing new challenges created by the new technologies…the problem is not just to use, or not to use the
technologies, but how to announce the Gospel to people living in the
social networks."
Asked about how the new Latin American Pope can
influence the way the Church responds to these challenges, Archbishop
Celli says: “I will give you an example: do you remember how the
Pope was embracing a young handicapped boy, placing his cheek near to
the cheek of the boy? No words, but that was the only way to communicate
something to that boy…I think this pope, Pope Francis, from Latin
America, is helping us to rediscover that communication is not only an
intellectual problem…..As you realize, he’s using images – last Holy
Thursday he was addressing priests working here in Rome, telling them
that a good priest must have the smell of the sheep to whom he is
belonging – a quite clear image! With that image the Holy Father was
communicating a lot of concepts that people can perceive immediately
from that image...It means that Pope Francis is not only touching the
intellectual aspect, but is touching the heart and the imagination –
that is why I’m talking about a new approach to communication…”