TELLING DAILY EVENTS WITH HISTORY IN MIND

Emilio Rossi

It is obvious to forecast that the Jubilee of 2000 will benefit from the means of mass communication. A little less obvious but - if we reflect a moment - more evocative, to hope that the means of mass-communication will benefit from the Jubilee. The objective of this hope is not success in terms of quantity of "audience", which is also one of the justified forecasts. The objective is richer and above all different. We had a first experience of it in this century on the occasion of the Council, which Pope John Paul II significantly considers strictly linked to the jubilee event.

Shall we attempt an anamnesis? With the passing of time, waves of disenchantment have almost completely wiped out a spiritual heritage accumulated in long years. Precious profundity of vision - both in the direction of memory and in the direction of future - have apparently been flattened out into a precarious "civilization of the present".

Along the path of idolatrous progress and unlimited subjectivity, we have lost the rhythm and taste of the great story: of the story which has roots, which gives meaning, which promises a future. Our culture has reduced itself more and more to a brief report: day by day, or better, minute by minute, including real time which in actual fact is not even time, but rather an instant reduced to a point without reference. And in this news we tumble ever further, as if in a turbulent shaker. This leads to a loss of capacity to reflect, compare, evaluate, orientate, hope. In brief, we are becoming short of breath, in our haste to devour all intervals.

We journalists, in particular, are aware of this. Not without extenuating circumstances typical of our profession, its rules, its rhythms. And yet ... and yet we should all search, each doing his own part, antidotes, factors of compensation, not counting the need to keep open, outside the informative area, a fan of cultural spheres, of languages and values.

Well, precisely in this research the Jubilee offers us a rare occasion. Even apart from its authentic contents, this Jubilee is at least an appointment which is measured well beyond the present moment, indeed in millenniums. This long-time takes a long revenge and delivers us, if we are willing, from the hegemony of the instant. Thus it is already an invitation to conversion: at least in the sense that not only of news lives man, that important too is what went before and what coems after (with the consequent inter-generation responsibilities), leaving the door open to a Beyond. If then we consider that the event we are called to record is no less than - striding over all the furrows between tribe and tribe - an encounter between time and eternity, the Word Redeemer becoming man, the occasion is truly propitious for a correction of vision which could be decisive.

It was said of the years of the Council. Then very distant, although through information often inadequate, they discovered, or re-discovered, horizons, destinies unknown or forgotten. That a similar combination may be renewed and possibly dilated and consolidated on the occasion of the Jubilee is, on the one hand, something to be hoped, (which the Pope has already expressed) and on the other, a duty. Certainly it is a question of the final things, the ultimate questions. But in some measure we can involve, through inter-agent processes, also our manner of telling, once in a while with adequate space, daily life, which is the humble, but not irrelevant professional duty of us reporters.