Highlight the positive message, says Vatican spokesman

Fr. Federico Lombardi

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Toronto

The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, urged members of the Catholic media to highlight the positive and beautiful in life, while not ducking the responsibility to recognize and denounce evil.

"It is always necessary to have a criterion, a hierarchy in expressing the Christian proposition," Lombardi told several hundred communications professionals at a plenary session of the international Catholic Media Convention May 29.

"That which is positive takes first place."

Accent on the positive

He pointed out it was "no accident" Pope Benedict's first encyclical was on love, and his second was on hope, nor that his first book was "on Jesus who shows us the face of God."

"Benedict XVI insists that ours is not a religion of prohibitions, of 'nos,'" he said.

Pope Benedict, however, has been realistic and uncompromising in his critiques of relativism, subjectivism, individualism, materialism and hedonism, he said.

"We have to know how to recognize and denounce the evils, the risks and the dead ends present in contemporary culture," he said.

"Deep in the hearts of many people, there is the hope for something good," Lombardi said.

He noted how, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, television stations approached him, asking for pictures of Pope John Paul II at prayer while Europe observed a minute of silence to honour the victims.

He arranged for pictures of the pope praying in silence at the papal villa in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, and those photos were transmitted worldwide.

Lombardi said Pope Benedict echoed this image when he prayed at ground zero in Manhattan during his April trip to the United States. He described this as "one of the most intense and evocative moments of the time spent in America."

He said the death of Pope John Paul provided "the greatest media event in the history of social communications."

Lombardi recalled that during his long association with Pope John Paul, he was deeply struck by the pope's prophetic vision of television's possibilities.

Problems and evils

Lombardi said that, until he watched the pope, he had seen TV as a "source of various problems and evils."

Pope John Paul saw "beyond what things are" to what they should be, he said.

Lombardi urged members of the Catholic media to confront difficult problems and tell the truth. He gave as an example the way the pope addressed the clerical abuse crisis when he visited the United States. Not only did Pope Benedict speak candidly about the evils of the abuse, but he made his words even more credible by his private, respectful meeting with some victims, he said.

"Every ambiguity, every reticence and, worse still, every intentional concealment of the truth will exact a dear price in the end," he said.

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