1993 - 27th World Communications Day

MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER JOHN PAUL II
FOR THE 27th WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY

"Videocassettes and audiocassettes in the formation of culture and of conscience"
[Sunday, 23 May 1993]

My dear brothers and sisters,

More than a full year after the publication of the Church's latest pastoral instruction on communications media,  Aetatis Novae, we are still reflecting on the vision of the modern world which it presented, and still trying to grasp the practical implications of the media situation it described. This is precisely what the Church would wish us to do. The entire family of the Church must involve itself prayerfully in the search for understanding and awareness in the unprecedented situations so often nowadays cast up by the world's headlong progress in discovery and development. Each individual must add his voice to the Church's unceasing petition for wisdom, for we greatly need divine guidance in order to grasp each opportunity that offers to serve God and His people, while at the same time taking the measures necessary to fend off whatever evil may threaten them.
The pastoral instruction Aetatis Novae, we should notice, uses the word "new" even in its own title. "At the dawn of a new era", it says, "a vast expansion of human communications is profoundly influencing culture everywhere", and it goes on to claim that everybody is affected. The instruction uses the word "new" again and again: "new media", "new languages", "new opportunities", in its anxiety to illustrate that the world in the Eighties and Nineties is no longer the same as it was in previous decades and generations. The argument is that the world in which God's people are on pilgrimage is quite largely a changed place, and that "new media" are quite largely responsible for changing it. The pilgrim people, however, must adapt to what is changed, must find ways to cope with it, must search to turn it to God's glory and the service of all his creation.
In my message for World Communications Day last year, I mentioned that among the things we always celebrate on this annual occasion are the gifts of speech, of hearing, and of sight, which God has given us in order to make communication possible between us. This year the theme of the Day focuses on two specific "new" media which serve these very senses in a quite remarkable way, namely, audiocassettes and videocassettes.