Pope Francis on the Media

In the book on Heaven and Earth, I just just read a couple of remarks by Pope Francis in which he makes some astute observations about the Press, Media, Politics, and Clericalism, among other hot button issues. I admire how freely he speaks, speaks up and speaks out, uninhibited, not-one-bit-intimidated, open, friendly and humble, even though he is aware what he says is not going to be accurately represented in the morning paper. 

 Here's one gem: "The problem of the press, truthfully, is that sometimes they reduce what one says to whatever is opportune. Today, from two or three facts, the media spins something different: they misinform."

Here's another: "Today image is more important than what is proposed. Plato said in The Republic, rhetoric- which equates aesthetic- is to politics what cosmetics is to health. We have displaced the essential with the aesthetic; we have deified polling and marketing."

This third one is another favorite: "The media's way of putting things, in black and white, is a sinful tendency that always favors conflict over unity...Today there is misinformation because only part of the truth is said, only what interests them is taken for their convenience, and that does a lot of damage because it is a way of favoring conflict. If I read five newspapers comparing the same story, it is very often that each one will emphasize the part it is most interested in according to its inclination."

Christ's Conception of Life.

"Jesus Christ did not come into the world as a substitute for human effort, for human freedom, or to eliminate human trial - the existential condition of freedom. He came into the world to call man back to the depths of all questions, to his own fundamental structure, and to his own real situation. If certain human values are not safeguarded, all the problems man is called to resolve in the trial of life do not dissolve, but rather become more complicated. Jesus Christ came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution of those problems is a lie. The problem of the knowledge of the meaning of things (truth), making use of things (work), human awareness (love), human co-existence (society and politics), lack a proper formulation, and so, to the extent that religiosity is not at the foundation of the search for their solution, they generate ever greater confusion in the history of the individual and humanity as a whole."

At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Luigi Giussani, p. 97