VATICAN (CNS): Communication is something divine with the power “to build—build communities, build up the Church,” Pope Francis told thousands of journalists and people working in media and communication during an audience in the Paul VI Audience Hall on January 25.
“To know how to communicate displays great wisdom,” he said in brief remarks.
He encouraged participants in the January 24-26 Jubilee of the World of Communications to remember that it is not enough to communicate the truth, they also must be true and authentic people in their hearts and in the way they live their lives.
The midday encounter came after thousands of the pilgrims walked through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica and made the profession of faith at the tomb of St. Peter, and after the pope had had a full morning of meetings.
The pope held up his written speech and said, “I have in my hands a nine-page speech” and “at this time of day when the stomach starts rumbling, to read nine pages would be torture.”
In his text, the pope made an urgent appeal for the release of unjustly imprisoned journalists, which, according to Reporters without Borders in 2024, numbered more than 500 people.
“The freedom of journalists increases the freedom of us all,” he wrote, asking those with the power to do so to release during the Jubilee Year those who were detained merely “for wanting to see with their own eyes and for trying to report what they have seen.”
Freedom of the press and freedom of thought must be “defended and safeguarded along with the fundamental right to be informed,” the pope wrote.
Without “free, responsible and correct information,” Pope Francis said, “we risk no longer distinguishing truth from lies; without this, we expose ourselves to growing prejudices and polarisations that destroy the bonds of civil coexistence and prevent fraternity from being rebuilt.”
He said, “We need media literacy to educate ourselves and to educate others in critical thought, the patience of discernment necessary for knowledge, and to promote the personal growth and active participation of every one of us in the future of our own communities.”
The pope wrote, “We need courageous entrepreneurs, courageous information engineers, so that the beauty of communication is not corrupted. Great change cannot be the result of a multitude of sleeping minds but rather begins with the communion of enlightened hearts.”
He said, “Not all stories are good, and yet these too must be told,” he wrote. “Evil must be seen in order to be redeemed, but it is necessary to be told well so as not to wear out the fragile threads of cohabitation.”
