AN INVITATION TO THINK AND TO FEEL THE BIG PICTURE

Gaetano Afeltra

Journalist and writer

The Jubilee is a planetary event that commits all of us, singly or collectively, to the question of how to face it, that is to say how to confront it in an adequate way. This confrontation, also for non-believers, comes on a multiplicity of levels: from the ethical level to the intellectual, from traditions, and even that practical and effective level. Our society lives off of production and an untiring consumption of "news": in its every point, in every instance the images abound (conjectures, falsities), to go on and be absorbed, re-elaborated, substituted by new ones. Therefore it is easy to see what the Jubilee, which will involve bodies and consciences of millions of people, will mean for the great world machine of information.

The massive human transmigration towards Italy and Rome, for the occasion, will pale in comparison to the "long army" of pilgrims (as Dante called them) in the 1300's, the year in which Boniface VIII inaugurated the celebration (and Villani in the "news" wrote: «throughout the entire year, there came to Rome, besides the Roman population, 200,000 pilgrims, without counting those who would come and go...»). Already, just three years away from the date, the Jubilee has agitated the mass media, especially the newspapers, if the attention is focused on technical aspects, I will call them, logistics, economics, of this sort of peaceful invasion, with problems arising with political interests playing a great role.

In reality, the event requires that the machine of information somewhat rethinks its objectives, its means of working, and I don't want to say it obligations, but its fundamental functions. We cannot say that in the last decades the Italian press and TV have not given attention to religious problems.

Apart from the obligations of informing on the new initiatives, on the trips, on the addresses of John Paul II, the mass media also touch upon other religious aspects of the public and private life and of course the questions of faith. But, this attention still has something ambiguous about it: often privileging certain aspects, let's say, the more spectacular and problematic ones, such as the resistence or the concession of the Church in the sphere of moral sexuality, and the efforts to bring it in harmony with the changing traditions.

Recently, in French a book was published entitled "Dieu dans la pub" (God in the pub). It is a theological analysis of the religious element in advertising. It is a quite difficult to consider this a "sacred" need, this discovery of using the divinity(or at least religious figures) as witnesses in commercials (whoever looks at our television can also find examples).

The Jubilee, coming at an epochal turn, at the advent of the third millennium (even the date has an intrinsic hint) should be a moment capable of making us all feel "more grand." We cannot think, it would not even be desirable, if information, in its context, becomes a hagiographic function, predicator: instead, that it helps everyone regain the fundamental themes of life, to re-examine a century that was one of the most cruel and difficult, to open it to hope.

It therefore not only requires telling the news scrupulously about all that happens in the world, the Jubilee, which will be an enormous "show" (I use the term in its most noble meaning), but to stimulate the people, who are often distracted believing that the event has more than just a rite of celebration. We must help the conscience grow, but at the same time to deepen the conscience.

Within the celebration of believers, the non-believers can also find stimulation to question themselves: on what real peace is, tolerance, not only in international relations and social relations, but in the daily existence, in relations with others and finally with oneself; on the sense of the destiny of everyone. I believe, if it is not a foolish thought, that one of the duties of the occasion, in speaking about the great machine of information, is to bring to a society which is almost demented with noise and the accumulation of unnecessary news, the need to regroup, to return within oneself. Therefore, of a moment of silence. It would be a conquest of the Jubilee.