Communicate the joy of the Gospel with witness
Pope Francis Blesses the Faithful (Stock photo FreeImages.com)
An excerpt from the address of Pope Francis to the Communications Dicastery on September 23, 2019
To communicate is precisely to take from the Being of God and to have the same attitude; not to be able to remain alone: the need to communicate what I have and I think that it is the true, the just, the good and the beautiful. Communicating. And you are specialists in communication, you are technicians in communication. We must not forget this. You communicate with the soul and the body; you communicate with the mind, the heart, the hands; you communicate with everything. The true communicator gives everything, he gives all of himself – as we say in my country, “he puts all the meat on the grill”, he does not spare any for himself. And it is true that the greatest communication is love: in love there is the fullness of communication: love for God and among us.
But what should communication be like? One of the things you must not do is advertising, mere advertising. You must not behave like human business that try to attract more people… To use a technical word: you must not proselytize. I would like our communication to be Christian and not a factor of proselytism. It is not Christian to proselytize. Benedict XVI said this very clearly: “The Church grows not by proselytism, but by attraction”, that is, by witness. And our communication must be witness. If you want to communicate just one truth without goodness and beauty, stop, do not do it. If you want to communicate a truth more or less, but without involving yourselves, without witnessing that truth with your own life, with your own flesh, stop, do not do it. There is always the signature of the witness in each of the things we do. Witnesses. Christians are witnesses, “martyrs”. This is the “martyr” dimension of our vocation: to be witnesses.
