VATICAN CITY, APRIL 3, 2003 (Zenit.org).- The advances made in communication technologies pose questions about the meaning of life that the Church must answer by presenting the person of Jesus Christ and his humanizing message, says John Paul II.
Indeed, communication is the place where faith and culture meet and dialogue, the Pope said in a message to the participants of a congress on the Church and information technology (IT) under way this week in Monterrey, Mexico.
The letter, signed on behalf of the Pope by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, was read on Wednesday by Archbishop Giuseppe Bertello, papal nuncio in Mexico, during a Mass attended by almost 1,000 congress participants. They came from 25 countries.
Greetings were extended to the participants in the Continental Meeting of RIIAL (Information Network of the Church in Latin America), as well as that of the episcopates’ social communications commissions, which are being held, respectively, before and after the congress.
«The complexity of the communications system in which we move — Internet is one more proof of it — causes bewilderment about what is real, what surrounds us, and who surrounds us,» the letter says.
«The question that the new technologies pose to man, who sees himself immersed in a technological world, continues to be the question about the meaning of life: ‘Who am I? Where do I come from and where am I going? Why does evil exist? What is there after life?'» the letter adds.
According to the Pope, «the Church offers the only definitive satisfactory answer to the most profound questions of the human heart: Jesus Christ himself fully manifests man to man, and shows him the grandeur of his vocation.»
Given the above, «faith and culture are called to meet and interact precisely in the area of communication: the concrete realization of their meeting and interaction, of their intensity and efficacy, depends to a large extent on the suitability of the instruments used for communication,» he stressed.
More information on the IT congress is at www.iglesiaeinformatica.org.mx.
