Future Leo XIV offered warnings on screens culture

Can pastors help their people move from "spectacle and into mystery"?

Dear Protestant readers of Rational Sheep (and those in other non-Tiber tribes):

Hang on. The global media storm surrounding the election of Pope Leo XIV will soon fade to some degree (until he wears a Chicago White Sox jersey or something like that). This post centers on the fact that the priest and bishop who is now pope has, in the past, offered some strong, insightful appeals for church leaders to face the realities of the digital age.

For starters, there is the issue of this pope’s choice of a name. In his first public address to the College of Cardinals he noted:

… I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

In terms of mainstream news coverage, the obvious topics for early coverage are “Who is this guy?” and “How did he get elected?” Once again, I urge readers — in all pews — to head to Catholic news sources, left of center and to the right of center, to find reporting that digs deeper than political metaphors.

Personally, I thought that this summary at the Rorate Caeli ("Drop down, O heavens") website was fascinating. This provocative paragraph, at a website frequented by pro-Catechism Catholics, is backed by interesting references to online research (and a few claims of insider contacts).

Robert Francis Prevost has become Pope Leo XIV. Before May 8, 2025, most people did not know the name Prevost, but now he is the chief shepherd of over a billion Catholics. Both orthodox Catholics and modernists have been celebrating, while there have been naysayers on both sides, too. This reflects the fact Prevost was touted as a ‘compromise candidate’ and pushed by strong prelates on both sides. Both the orthodox and the modernists seem to think, or hope, that the new Pope actually leans more in their direction, with orthodox faithful especially being optimistic after his more traditional choice of papal attire and his orthodox first papal mass. So, to put it crudely, the real question is: who got played?

I am, as always, more interested in information about Catholic debates on doctrine than I am in elite media speculations about how the new pope may weaken the global clout of one Donald Trump (Hello, New York Times).

Obviously, I want to know if Pope Leo XIV, while talking about the digital age, asks his bishops to address the impact of screens culture in Catholic homes. Will the pope express concerns about smartphones and tablets in Catholic schools and, yes, churches?

Thus, I will ask: Is there a good chance that we are talking about a papal audience with Jonathan Haidt — a secular Jew who recognizes the urgent need for dialogue with religious leaders — in year one? Who else would you nominate for a trip to Rome to discuss faith, family and digital issues?

I did, of course, notice that the new pope scheduled a quick address to journalists who have flocked to Rome to cover the conclave, which mainstream news executives view as a cross between the Olympics and a U.S. presidential election.

That papal text contains little of interest, in my opinion, other than a kind of “peace, peace” appeal for a kinder and gentler approach to news. Here’s a sample from that event, earlier today:

Today, one of the most important challenges is to promote communication that can bring us out of the “Tower of Babel” in which we sometimes find ourselves, out of the confusion of loveless languages that are often ideological or partisan. Therefore, your service, with the words you use and the style you adopt, is crucial. As you know, communication is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture, of human and digital environments that become spaces for dialogue and discussion. In looking at how technology is developing, this mission becomes ever more necessary. I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity. This responsibility concerns everyone in proportion to his or her age and role in society.

All well and good. But let’s jump to some material that you may, or may not, see quoted in the mainstream press. I am talking about 2012 remarks by then Bishop Prevost at the 2012 Synod on Evangelization.

Note the video at the top of this post. Here are some key chunks of material posted at the Community in Mission website.

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, 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.

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.

This jumped out at me: Prevost’s emphasis on news professionals viewing the defense of church doctrine as mere arguments about political “ideology” — a major theme in posts at GetReligion.org over the years.

Let’s look at one more passage that is relevant to Rational Sheep discussions.

Should churches hang massive video screens and try to compete with the popular forms of digital culture? No, says Prevost. But the church does need to notice the changing cultural context of its work and be prepared to debate, dare I say, important “signals” from these principalities and powers?

Let’s keep reading:

Church fathers, among them John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, were not great rhetoricians insofar as they were great preachers. They were great preachers because they were first great rhetoricians. In other words, their evangelizing was successful in great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. Consequently, 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, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum, and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.

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 by 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.

Well, that’s rather blunt. Can I get an “Amen”?

Stay tuned, to say the least.