RIIALthe Church Information Network in Latin Americawhich has been carrying out digital communication and pastoral initiatives for more than thirty years. With his initiative and the supervision of the Dicastery for Communication, a consultation was launched in recent months to the internet people with the project The Church listens to youThe "pastoral care of the ear" so dear to Pope Francis, with the approach of the "Church going out", is also applied in these spaces.
Some 250 participants digital evangelizersThe company, as they have been called, which, through an online questionnaire, have opened this listening conversation to involve especially those who are far away, but also to begin to lay the foundations of a real pastoral care of the digital continent.
With respect to dioceses and bishops' conferences, the digital missionaries also prepared a summary of this first phase of listening, delivered to the General Secretariat of the Synod. A total of 110 thousand questionnaires were filled out, for an estimated number of 20 million people involved, taking into account the commitments and actions in the network: 115 countries involved and 7 languages covered (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Malayalam and Tagalog).
A cross-cutting reality to accompany
The ten pages of the document make it clear, first of all, that it is a pilot projectThis is an open window to a transversal reality, such as the digital continent, which must also be accompanied.
One of the discoveries made by the experience of digital listening is the existence of a large number of lay people, not only priests, religious or consecrated, who evangelize on the web with audacity and creativity. In fact, there are real interactive processes "between proclamation, the search for faith and accompaniment".The document states. Of all the influencers involved, the 63 % were, of course, catechists and committed lay people.
At the same time, "evangelizers expressed the need to be heard, helped, recognized and integrated into the wider action of the Church".. In addition to establishing a relationship "formal and reciprocal" with the Institution, in order to also contribute to its communicative culture.
Another issue is that of abandoning the consideration of digital reality as a mere tool and understanding it instead as a site (locus) to be inhabited "with its own language and dynamics".
In addition to the baptized and practicing believers, there was a significant participation of people distant or who have distanced themselves (40 %); agnostics, members of other religions and atheists (10 %) who wished to participate in the listening project by filling out the questionnaire. The image that emerged is that of "wounded people expressing their existential questions.". Many feel excluded, disillusioned... and among the reasons for abandonment, the main one concerns the "scandal related to pederasty and corruption in the Church."which, among other things, does not even respond to "their concerns and priorities; others feel judged.".
This is obviously a first step, which everyone hopes will be continued in the next stages of the Synodto give greater consistency to the presence of the Church in this transversal place that is the Internet.
"To have carried out the project The Church listens to you is a beautiful and great fruit".Lucio Adrian Ruiz, secretary of the Dicastery for Communication, "that sows an important seed already in the present, and above all for the future".. In fact, "beyond the importance and the greatness of the contents produced, there is something even more essential and that is the synodal process itself, as Pope Francis often repeats".
The initiative was also validated publicly by the General Secretariat of the Synod, at the press conference presenting the continental phase of the synodal journey, which begins this month.
