Stories “can help us understand and communicate who we are” because we “human beings are storytellers” who need to be “‘clothed’ with stories to protect our lives”. Pope Francis emphasizes this in his message for World Communications Day 2020, published on Friday, the memorial of St. Francis de Sales, Patron Saint of journalists. The message, however, embraces a much broader horizon than the profession of journalism, which the Pope has got us accustomed to since his first message for World Communications Day (2014) when he established an ideal link between the evangelical figure of the Good Samaritan and the mission carried out today by “good communicators”. At a time marked by the deceptive and divisive use of the word, an “illness” from which the Catholic world is unfortunately not immune, the Pope reminds us that communication is authentic if it builds and does not destroy. It should be “humble” in the “search for truth”, as he stressed to the journalists of the Foreign Press Association last May. And in the face of the spread of “false and evil” stories – including the sophisticated aberration of deepfake – the Pope encourages that narration speak “of ourselves and of the beauty all around us” and help us “rediscover the roots and the strength to go ahead together”. We need, he exhorts, “to make our own the truth contained in good stories”.
Pope Francis, therefore, turns his attention to the story of Jesus, which shows how God has taken man to heart and that for Him “no human stories are insignificant or paltry”. “By the power of the Holy Spirit,” the Pope explains, “every story, even the most forgotten one,… can be reborn as a masterpiece, and become an appendix to the Gospel.” He cites some stories that have “admirably scripted the encounter between God’s freedom and that of man” from Augustine’s “Confessions” to “The Brothers Karamazov”. He invites us to read the stories of the saints and to share those “stories that have the fragrance of the Gospel” that each of us knows. “Telling God our story is never useless,” he reiterates, because “no one is an extra on the world stage, and everyone’s story is open to possible change”. For this reason, the Pope notes, “when we tell of evil” we can also “recognize the working of goodness and give it space”.
Pope Francis concludes his message with a prayer to Mary so that she listens to our stories and cherishes them. Recalling an image dear to him, which has featured in many of his homilies at Santa Marta, the Holy Father implores the Virgin Mary to untie “the tangled knots in our life” and “help us build stories of peace, stories that point to the future”. Vatican News Department
