Catholic Church of Portugal and Spain warns of the need to “rethink communication” – Observer
The need to rethink communication in the Catholic Church, “for the training of communicators” or “for the care in the messages”, was highlighted at the meeting of the episcopal commissions on Social Communications of Portugal and Spain, which ends today.
Meeting in Santiago de Compostela, in the Spanish region of Galicia, since yesterday, those responsible for the episcopal commissions of Portugal and Spain concluded that “the Church must be present in societynot for the transmission of a message and an ethics, but also to accompany all the concerns of the people alone”.
In this context, “it becomes necessary to rethink and build a new presence in the culturein social transformation and political activity, with the participation of lay people”, according to the final communiqué of the meeting released today.
Participants in church communication highlighted that, “in the time of meetings that digital tools communicate in an intense way, but with gaps, the Church must continue to be rethought, either through the communication of communicators, or through training in those who transmit, where proximity and dialogue with everyone is essential”.
“Social communication today can face two possibilities: the limits of the consumer society, facing the small, where it is difficult to distinguish the truth from the lie, or communicating a realistic and resistant hopebeing the voice of the voiceless, the suffering of the earth and the pain of humans”, highlights the statement.
At the end of the work, the president of the Episcopal Commission of Culture, Ben Social Portugal, João Lavrador, decided in collected by Ecclesia, that “all communication is addressed to the human being. Any human communication must lead to reality, it must be a true means of analyzing reality (…), but it also carries something that it must offer to human beings, not the repression of their frustrations or their problems, only, but of whatever offers it, horizon, testimonies that, deep down, are capable of transporting this reality and opening new ones”.
The works, which took place under the theme “Communicate a greater hope“, counted on the collaborator of João Duque, professor of Theology at the Portuguese Catholic University, who in September was awarded the Life Prize – Father Manuel Antunes, awarded by the National Secretariat for the Pastoral of Culture.