Newly Elected Pope Leo XIV Previously Criticized Western Media For "Fostering Within The General Public Enormous Sympathy For Beliefs And Practices That Are At Odds With The Gospel"

Father Robert Prevost, who was elected as Pope and took the name Leo XIV, previously criticized Western media for pushing ideas, practices, and beliefs that are at odds with the Gospel.

Back in 2012, the then Father Robert Prevost, who was the Prior General of the Augustinian Order, addressed the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization.

He said, “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel. For example, abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.”

“Religion is at best tolerated by mass media as tame and quaint when it does not actively oppose positions on ethical issues that the media have embraced as their own,” he continued. “However, when religious voices are raised in opposition to these positions, mass media can target religion labeling it as ideological and insensitive to the so-called vital needs of people in the contemporary world.”

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“The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully in grained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective,” he said. “Catholic pastors who preach against the legalization of abortion or the redefinition of marriage are portrayed as being ideologically driven, severe and uncaring, not because of anything they say or do, but because their audiences contrast their message with the sympathetic caring tones of media produced images of human being, who because they are caught in morally complex life situations opt for choices that are made to appear as helpful and good.”

“Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today,” he pointed out. “If the New Evangelization is going to counter these mass media produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers, and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the context of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media.”

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He then went on to offer a solution, “The Church Fathers offered a formidable response to those non-Christian and anti-Christian literary and rhetorical forces at work throughout the Roman Empire in shaping the religious and ethical imaginations of the day. The Confessions of St. Augustine with its central image of the core in creatum has shaped the way that Western Christians and non-Christians reimagine the adventure of religious conversion. In his City of God, Augustine used the tale of Alexander the Great’s encounter with a captured pirate to ironize the supposed moral legitimacy of the Roman Empire.”

“Church Fathers among them John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Leo the Great, Gregory of Nyssa were not great rhetoricians in so far as they were great preachers. They were great preachers because they were first great rhetoricians,” he continued. “In other words, their evangelizing was successful in great part because they understand the foundations of social communication to the world in which they lived. Consequently, they understood with enormous precision the techniques through which popular religious and ethical imaginations of their day were manipulated by the centers of secular power in that world.”

“Moreover, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the Sacred Liturgy into spectacle. Here again, Church Fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the seculum and our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle.”

“As a consequence evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery,” he concluded.

What do you make of the now Pope Leo XIV’s comments about Western media from back in 2012?

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