Extracts from the pope’s message titled ‘The truth in love’ (Eph 4:15) to mark the World Day of Social Communication on Ascension Sunday:

Clearly and purely

“In order to communicate truth with charity, it is necessary to purify one’s heart. Only by listening and speaking with a pure heart can we see beyond appearances and overcome the vague din which, also in the field of information, does not help us discern in the complicated world in which we live. The call to speak with the heart radically challenges the times in which we are living, which are so inclined towards indifference and indignation, at times even on the basis of disinformation which falsifies and exploits the truth.”

Through the heart

“One of his [St Francis de Sales’] convictions was: ‘In order to speak well, it is enough to love well’. It shows that for him, communication should never be reduced to something artificial, to a marketing strategy, as we might say nowadays, but is rather a reflection of the soul, the visible surface of a nucleus of love that is invisible to the eye. For St Francis de Sales, precisely ‘in the heart and through the heart, there comes about a subtle, intense and unifying process in which we come to know God’.”

Open to dialogue

“We need communicators who are open to dialogue, engaged in promoting integral disarmament and committed to undoing the belligerent psychosis that nests in our hearts, as St John XXIII prophetically urged in the encyclical Pacem in Terris: “True peace can only be built in mutual trust” (No. 113); a trust which has no need of sheltered or closed communicators but bold and creative ones who are ready to take risks to find common ground on which to meet. …All belligerent rhetoric must be rejected, as well as every form of propaganda that manipulates the truth, disfiguring it for ideological ends. Instead, what must be promoted is a form of communication that helps create the conditions to resolve controversies between peoples.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)