JOURNALISTS AS PIONEERS IN A WORLD TO BE DISCOVERED

Filippo Di Giacomo

Editorialist of "Il Messaggero"

From the Council until today, much water has rushed under the bridge. And it is likely that even the Vaticanist (or "Vaticanology" ?) will succeed, sooner or later, to rinse out his own laundry. In that river with which the New Evangelization, from the Second Vatican Council to our own days, is irrigating a good part of the Catholic world. In fact, it is impossible to fail to take into account that which the apostolic trips of this pontificate have abundantly witnessed. Not only is the Church news for the world: it is above all news in the world.

Never before as in the last 18 years has the mass media been obliged to notify, often despite themselves, and always spurred by an ecclesial dynamism without borders, so many "contents of conscience". That then such a pluriform reality be always correctly translated into the language of communication is a fact rather marginal. The mass media revolution underway has newly made pioneers of all those employed in this industry. The Church is by definition a master of verbal communication. It knows the word as symbol of God (Jn 1, 1) and accepts language as the means with which God reveals Himself (Jn 1, 14). And even the intermediary communication, that which is trusted to codification and technical translations, is not at all foreign to it: how could the Church be universal without this ability? The great Jubilee of the year 2000, just like the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, was announced as an act of solidarity with the whole human race. And this, with means unthinkable 35 years ago, is achievable almost simultaneously thanks to the mass media global village.

With the end of the millennium, religious communication will have the possibility of living a new springtime. A Church so profoundly rooted in its universality will not be able to be proclaimed only within the Leonine walls. Because, as John XXIII prophesied, the post-Conciliar Church is not a museum to care for but a garden to cultivate.