Rome, Italy, Oct 4, 2010 / 17:34 pm
The role of the Catholic press today might be one of providing a service of "counter-information," said a prominent figure in the Catholic media on Monday. Speaking of the global challenges to the Catholic media today, the director of Italy's most important Catholic newspaper, Avvenire, called for news sources to strongly bear witness to the authenticity of Christianity.
The director of the Italian bishops' Avvenire newspaper, Marco Tarquinio, made an address on the first day of the Catholic Press Congress being hosted by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. He was one of four directors from major Catholic publications to address the assembly during a session on global challenges to Catholic media.
Emphasizing to participants that "the message is everything," he said that all too often the truth of Christianity is recounted in the media only when it enters into crisis or participates in some way in the more general "crisis of the times." In this context, he noted, it is made to appear that the Christian voice enters the debate already on the defensive, engaging in a fight "destined to inevitably conclude with surrender."
Tarquinio underscored that this is not the case. He used the terminology of Benedict XVI, saying that "the destiny of Christian communities, even when they are a minority” is to be “a sign, a sign of contradiction."