Vatican City, Apr 26, 2010 / 13:11 pm
Participants in the "Digital Witnesses: Faces and languages in the multi-media age” congress, hosted by the Italian bishop’s conference, heard the Holy Father speak this morning on the need to ensure digital technologies lead to an encounter with the whole person.
“The time in which we are living is seeing an enormous expansion of the frontiers of communication," noted the Pope. The Holy Father added that “the Internet is by nature open, tendentiously egalitarian and pluralist, but at the same time it also represents a new gulf.”
“The dangers of conformity and control, of intellectual and moral relativism, which are already evident in the diminution of the spirit of criticism, in the truth reduced to an interplay of opinions, in the many forms of degradation and humiliation of individual intimacy. We are witnessing a 'pollution of the spirit which clouds our faces and makes them less prone to smile,’” he warned.
In his talk, the Holy Father also spoke of the “digital divide,” which creates new borders of inclusion and exclusion, on top of the factors which already divide nations from one another and within themselves.