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What is World Communications Day?
Every year on the Sunday before Pentecost the Church celebrates the achievements of the communications media and focuses of how it can best use them to promote gospel values.
What is it?
World Communications Day was established by Pope Paul VI in 1967 as an annual celebration that encourages us to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that the modern means of social communication (the press, motions pictures, radio, television and the internet) afford the Church to communicate the gospel message.
Where did it come from?
The celebration came in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which realised it must engage fully with the modern world. This realisation is expressed in the opening statement of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes on “The Church in the Modern World”, which says: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anguishes of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anguishes of the followers of Christ as well.”
Why it is celebrated every year?
In setting it up on Sunday 7th May 1967, less than two years after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI, knowing that the Church is truly and intimately linked with mankind and its history, wanted to draw attention to the communications media and the enormous power they have for cultural transformation.
He and his successors have consistently recognised the positive opportunities the communications media afford for enriching human lives with the values of truth, beauty and goodness, but also the possibly negative effects of spreading less noble values and pressurising minds and consciences with a multiplicity of contradictory appeals.
The communications world: first Areopagus of the modern age
Pope John Paul II (1990) in his encyclical Redemptoris missio 37 said: “The world of communications is the first Areopagus of the modern age, unifying humanity and turning it into what is known as a ‘global village’. The communications media have acquired such importance as to be for many the chief means of information and education, of guidance and inspiration for many people in their personal, family and social behaviour. In particular, the younger generation is growing up in a world conditioned by the mass media.”
Increasingly aware of the world as a global village and the power of the media as a free market place for philosophies and values, the Church has sought to be in there with its message and to use the media to proclaim the values it sees are beneficial for human development and for the eternal welfare of people.
Analysis and action
Two important documents of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications – ‘Communio et Progressio’ (1971) and ‘Aetatis Novae’ (1992) have presented an analysis of the world of the communications media and made recommendations for the Church’s action. The Vatican itself has set a headline in updating its use of the full range of the communications media.
In 2002, The Pontifical Council for Social Communications produced two documents on the Internet. The first is an analysis of the opportunities and challenges the Internet presents for evangelisation and is entitled ‘The Church and Internet’. The other sets out an ethical code which should guide its use and is entitled ‘Ethics in Internet’.
WCD history excerpted from catholicireland.net
World Communications Day 2024
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 58th WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS
https://www.signisasia.net/58th-world-day-of-social-communications-2024/
Artificial Intelligence and the Wisdom of the Heart:
Towards a Fully Human Communication
Only together can we increase our capacity for discernment and vigilance and for seeing things in the light of their fulfilment. Lest our humanity lose its bearings, let us seek the wisdom that was present before all things (cf. Sir 1:4): it will help us also to put systems of artificial intelligence at the service of a fully human communication.
World Communications Day 2023
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 2023 WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY:
https://www.signisasia.net/wcd2023-57th-world-day-of-social-communications/
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/communications/documents/20230124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html
Speaking with the heart
“The truth in love” (Eph 4:15)
As Christians, we know that the destiny of peace is decided by conversion of hearts, since the virus of war comes from within the human heart. From the heart come the right words to dispel the shadows of a closed and divided world and to build a civilisation which is better than the one we have received. Each of us is asked to engage in this effort, but it is one that especially appeals to the sense of responsibility of those working in the field of communications so that they may carry out their profession as a mission.
World Communications Day 2022
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 2022 WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY:
https://www.signisasia.net/wcd2022-56th-world-communications-day/
“Listening with the ear of the heart“
“With the awareness that we participate in a communion that precedes and includes us, we can rediscover a symphonic Church, in which each person is able to sing with his or her own voice, welcoming the voices of others as a gift to manifest the harmony of the whole that the Holy Spirit composes.”
World Communications Day 2021
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 2021 WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY: https://www.signisasia.net/wcd2021-55th-world-communications-day/
“Come and See” (Jn 1:46). Communicating by Encountering People Where and as They Are
“…we need to go and see them for ourselves, to spend time with people, to listen to their stories and to confront reality, which always in some way surprises us. “Open your eyes with wonder to what you see, let your hands touch the freshness and vitality of things, so that when others read what you write, they too can touch first-hand the vibrant miracle of life.”
World Communications Day 2020
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 2020 WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY:
http://www.signisasia.net/54th-world-communications-day/
Pope Francis’ Message for the 54th World Communications Day this year is based on the theme, “‘That you may tell your children and grandchildren’: Life becomes history.” The passage, drawn from the Book of Exodus, highlights the importance of sharing “knowledge of the Lord” and meaningful memories, stories and experiences, so that they may transform people’s lives.
Jesus, who is “the quintessential storyteller — the Word,” spoke of God “not with abstract concepts, but with parables, brief stories taken from everyday life” so that “the story becomes part of the life of those who listen to it, and it changes them.”
World Communications Day 2019
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE 2019 WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY:
« “We are members one of another” (Eph 4,25).
From social network communities to the human community »
Communion in the image of the Trinity is precisely what distinguishes the person from the individual. From faith in God who is Trinity, it follows that in order to be myself I need others. I am truly human, truly personal, only if I relate to others. In fact, the word “person” signifies the human being as a “face”, whose face is turned towards the other, who is engaged with others. Our life becomes more human insofar as its nature becomes less individual and more personal; we see this authentic path of becoming more human in one who moves from being an individual who perceives the other as a rival, to a person who recognises others as travelling companions.
The image of the body and the members reminds us that the use of the social web is complementary to an encounter in the flesh that comes alive through the body, heart, eyes, gaze, breath of the other. If the Net is used as an extension or expectation of such an encounter, then the network concept is not betrayed and remains a resource for communion.
This is the network we want, a network created not to entrap, but to liberate, to protect a communion of people who are free. The Church herself is a network woven together by Eucharistic communion, where unity is based not on “likes”, but on the truth, on the “Amen”, by which each one clings to the Body of Christ, and welcomes others.