Brian R Corbin's Reflections on Religion and Life

Living Your Faith as Citizens and Leaders in Politics, Culture, Society and Business

May 4, 2008 • 7:57 pm 0

Media Council Note Leads Up to World Communications Day

Prelate: Truth-Seeking Is Path to Communion

VATICAN CITY, MAY 2, 2008 ( Zenit.org ).- The president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications is reiterating Benedict XVI’s call for an “info-ethics.”

Archbishop Claudio Celli made this invitation in a commentary distributed by the pontifical council on the Pope’s message for World Communications Day.

The world day will be celebrated this Sunday.

The Holy Father’s message notes that there are many people who now see a need for info-ethics, similar to bioethics in the field of medicine and scientific investigation.

According to Archbishop Celli, Benedict XVI’s words “put us on the alert even more because social communications are profoundly linked to man, and therefore, they invite us to zealously defend the human person in every respect and in everything that man is and is called to be.”

“They are certainly words that encourage us. If the media is a challenge, it is before all else a challenge for human intelligence,” he said. “And the Church is not afraid of intelligence or of reason.”

If fact, Archbishop Celli, contended, “it can be affirmed that one who helps man to know himself and seek the truth encounters Christ.”

Fundamentally positive

The archbishop said the passage from John’s Gospel, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” is “a guide and help for facing the challenge that society directs today to communications media, to its operators and its receptors: the search for truth — which is possible to find — it is the path for communion between persons and peoples.”

Together with the commentary, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications distributed a “Brief Questionnaire on Info-Ethics.”

The statement’s seven questions and answers — which organize excerpts from previous documents — give a look at how the Church views the communications media and the role the Church should have in this field. It also looks at the growing use of the Internet and why there is a need for info-ethics.

“The Church’s approach to the means of social communication is fundamentally positive, encouraging,” the questionnaire affirms. “She does not simply stand in judgment and condemn; rather, she considers these instruments to be not only products of human genius but also great gifts of God and true signs of the times.”

However, the questionnaire continues, citing the Second Vatican Council, “If the media are to be correctly employed, it is essential that all who use them know the principles of the moral order and apply them faithfully in this domain.”

“A community, aware of the influence of the media, should learn to use them for personal and community growth, with the evangelical clarity and inner freedom of those who have learned to know Christ,” the questionnaire affirms.

It adds: “Like education in general, media education requires formation in the exercise of freedom. This is a demanding task. So often freedom is presented as a relentless search for pleasure or new experiences. Yet this is a condemnation not a liberation!

“True freedom could never condemn the individual — especially a child — to an insatiable quest for novelty. In the light of truth, authentic freedom is experienced as a definitive response to God’s ‘yes’ to humanity, calling us to choose, not indiscriminately but deliberately, all that is good, true and beautiful.”

— — —

On the Net:

Benedict XVI’s message: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20080124_42nd-world-communications-day_en.html

Brief Questionnaire on Info-Ethics: www.pccs.it/Documenti/HTML/Eng/GMCS/sussidi/42_gmcs_info_eng.pdf

Filed under: Papal Teachings, Social Doctrine, Social Justice

May 4, 2008 • 7:55 pm 0

Globalizing the Common Good

Social Sciences Academy Considers Subsidiarity, Solidarity

VATICAN CITY, MAY 2, 2008 ( Zenit.org ).- The Vatican is considering how the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity can work together in a globalized pursuit of the common good.

Today in the Vatican press office, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences presented its plenary session on “Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together.” The meeting began today and continues through Tuesday.

Participating in the press conference were Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; Margaret Archer of the University of Warwick, England; and Pierpaolo Donati of the University of Bologna, Italy.

The goal of the assembly, explained an English-language note released for the press conference, “is to give new meaning and application to the concept of common good in this age of globalization, which in certain fields is leading to growing inequalities and social injustice, laceration and fragmentation of the social fabric, in short, to the destruction of common goods throughout the world.”

The note continued: “The main hypothesis on which scholars are called to exchange their views is that the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity can, unlike the compromises between socialism and liberalism, mobilize new social, economic and cultural forces of civil society which, within politically shared fundamental values, can generate those common goods on which the future of humanity depends.”

4 principles

During the plenary session, participants will study current radical changes in light of four fundamental principles of Catholic social doctrine: the dignity of the human person, common good, solidarity and subsidiarity.

With this study, they seek “to understand how and in what measure these principles are effectively applied, and to suggest new solutions where they are misconstrued, misunderstood, disobeyed or distorted.”

With this in mind, the pontifical academy plans to examine case studies where the interweaving of these principles has been successful.

The note mentions cases such as the “economy of communion” and the “Food Bank”; shared access to information goods on communication networks, specifically the Internet; subsidiary educational activities in developing countries; and third-sector organizations using the instrument of microcredit for social, economic and human development.

The note concluded by underlining how “the fundamental challenge” facing the assembly is that “once we acknowledge that the great deficit of modernity, which is nevertheless responsible for many social conquests, has been and still is social solidarity — at all levels, from local to global — it is a matter of seeing whether and how this deficit can be overcome by a new way of intending and practicing subsidiarity as a proactive, promotional principle, not only as a defensive, protective one.”

“In short,” the pontifical academy said, “the challenge is for a new combination of subsidiarity and solidarity to become the key to activate those social circuits on which common goods depend, the key to turn globalization into a ‘civilization of the common good.'”

Filed under: Social Doctrine, Social Justice

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