In 2012 then-Father Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, noted that Western mass media fosters 'sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices.'
Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of remarks given in 2012 by then-Father Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, on the challenges of spreading the Gospel in a world where the mass media is often hostile to its saving message.
(LifeSiteNews) -- 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.
For example, abortion, the homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.
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.
READ: Pope Leo XIV urges journalists to build ‘peace,’ ‘search for truth’ in first audience
The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully ingrained 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.
Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage, are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe, and uncaring, not because of anything they say or do, but because their audiences contrast their message with the sympathetic, caring tones of media-produced images of human beings who, because they are caught in morally complex life situations, opt for choices that are made to appear as healthful and good.
Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today.
If the New Evangelization is going to counter these mass media produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers, and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the context of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media.
