This year’s pontifical message for the 43rd World Day of Communications is very telling in its content. The motto runs as follows: New Technologies, New Relationships. Promoting a Culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship.
We are a digital generation. The new technologies present to us the amazing potential of creating on-line friendships. Such friendships can be a catalyst towards global understanding between individuals and communities in various parts of our planet. Friendship is part and parcel of being human. Through friendships we grow and widen our existential and spiritual horizons.
The English Jacobean and metaphysical poet and preacher John Donne wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”. Every human being strives to be in relationship. Our current “digital continent” provides ipso facto an extraordinary arena where meaningful friendships can be initiated and cultivated. Cyberspace is the right place where respectful encounters and listening of cultures and religions can happen.
When on-line communication is soaked by tolerance, understanding and search for what is true and good, respect is brought about. A person starts to be valued for his/her very dignity and worth, i.e. for being a human being. Respect paves the way for dialogue. When the person is respected for who s/he is and for what s/he represents, s/he feels safer to know and be known. Trust starts coming into the fore. In talking and sharing things about himself/herself in an on-line interpersonal relationship, a person starts to appreciate more his/her origins as well as those of the other communicant/s with whom s/he is communicating. A friendship is slowly kicked off.
Although it is true that digital relationships can promote human solidarity, tolerance, peace and justice, human rights, respect for human life, communion and the good of creation on a global scale they can never be the substitutes for face to face communications. Furthermore, the human person needs substantial time for rest, silence and reflection so as to lead a healthy life. On-line friendships have to be carefully discerned and if necessary curtailed if they undermine our families, neighbours, and those we meet at work, education and recreation. Obsessiveness for virtual connectedness is never to be tolerated, let alone embraced. Digital friendships can be ‘baptised’ when their focus becomes the spreading of the good news of salvation. The new technologies can be faithful and powerful instruments for the Gospel that saves and gives life, and life in abundance in Jesus Christ for the life of the many.
Through virtual relationships imbued by the “Word of life” (1 Jn 1, 1), human hearts are healed by a love that endures, gifts that are shared, unity that is built, freedom that respects truth, and an identity that is found in respectful communion. Let us become the Gospel’s heralds by a faithful and responsible use of these powerful means of social communication which the digital age offers us. After all if our digital relationships are based on the digital face of the Lord, then they are surely blessed and destined to bear abundant good fruit!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Ca
San Gwann