This is an excerpt from the address of the Prior General of the Augustinians, of then-Fr. Robert F. Prevost, O.S.A., now Pope Leo XIV, at the Synod of Bishops held in Rome, October 7–28, 2012. The address was titled, “Mystery as an Antidote to Spectacle”: At least in the contemporary Western world—if not throughout the entire world—the human imagination concerning both religious faith and ethics is largely shaped by mass media, especially television and cinema. Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel. Religion is at best tolerated by mass media as “tame” and “quaint” when it does not actively oppose positions on ethical issues that the media have embraced as their own. However, when religious voices are raised in opposition to these positions, mass media can target religion, labeling it as ideological and insensitive in regard to the so-called vital needs of people in the contemporary world. In a world dominated by mass media, magisterial Church teaching can be helpful. Yet there is a great need for further development in this area. Noteworthy for its perception of the mass media context for evangelization is the post-conciliar document Aetatis Novae (1992). This document observed that modern media not only distorts reality by telling us what to think—it tells us what to think about. The Fathers of the Church can provide eminent guidance for the Church in this aspect of the new evangelization, precisely because they were masters of the art of rhetoric. With their rhetorical formation—which, for many of them, constituted the best training available in the late ancient world—the Church Fathers offered a formidable response to those non-Christian and anti-Christian literary and rhetorical forces at work throughout the Roman Empire in shaping the religious and ethical imaginations of the day. They understood with enormous precision the techniques through which popular religious and ethical imaginations of their day were manipulated by the centers of secular power in that world. Moreover, overt opposition to Christianity by mass media is only part of the problem. The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that, when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. It is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The secular media will always be stronger in this field. And while it is vital that the Church be actively engaged in and with the media, we cannot successfully compete with the secular media. In his City of God, Augustine teaches that mystery focuses the imagination on the darkness surrounding death—specifically, on the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion, which St. Augustine saw echoed in the deaths of the Christian martyrs. Spectacle, on the other hand—with its companion features: celebrity and heroism—offers people a false comfort by distracting the mind from its instinctive fear of death. Augustine saw this false comfort present in Roman theatre, sports events, secular festivals, and military honors. 🧵

An interview worth reading with Chilean Cardinal Chomali: detroitcatholic.com/news/chi…