Pope Leo XIV Warned That "If You Control The Media You Can At Least Partially Control The Way People Are Thinking"
In 2012 then Father Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV, warned about the hidden messages in sitcoms, dramas, and western entertainment in general.
In an interview in 2012 with Catholic News Services, Father Prevost was asked, “Should Catholics try to eliminate or drastically limit the use of digital media in their lives?”
He initially indicated he needed to give the question more thought although he does not believe that turning away from the media is possible. However, he then pivoted to an anecdote about a media personality not owning a TV. He opined that it was “very interesting that she works in the field, but she understands it seems that certainly you cannot just take at face value what’s offered in today’s society by mass media.”
“And I think personally that the answer rather than turning away is in the are of formation: How do we teach people to become critical thinkers? How do we teach people to understand that not everything you hear or everything you read should be taken at face value? And how do we come to give people the formation that they need to read something or to hear something and to be able to discern, if you will, to understand that underlying the message that’s being communicated is a very different message or a very subtle message that has severe consequences for the future of society, let’s say, that can or cannot be understood as part of a much bigger picture if you will,” he noted.
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“I began reflecting on this topic myself because of having lived outside the United States, now, for a number of years,” he continued. “And then when I would go back to the United States and perhaps just watch a TV show at random or visiting friends or relatives, seeing the change that has taken place in the kinds of content that are in sitcoms, that are spoken about on your regular TV programs, even on news shows the kinds of messages that seem to be portrayed, the slant that is taken at times in whichever direction, the kinds of even polemical argumentation that is presented on TV in the United States. Following through with that I think it’s not just the United States. We find it a lot in the Western world and it changes from place to place depending where you are.”
After providing a brief anecdote about from an Italian, he shared, “If you control the media you can at least partially control the way people are thinking because that’s the message that people hear constantly.”
“So again, I think our real challenge is in formation,” he reiterated. “Our challenge is in preparing people to become critical thinkers and to understand what’s going on in the world around us today.”
When asked about the various social media algorithms that favor certain types of content, he said, “It is very powerful, wide reaching and can be very effective just as it can be damaging in the sense that, again, if someone does not have discerning or critical ability to see what’s there, it can also mislead someone very easily.”
This interview with Catholic News Services was conducted following Father Prevost’s speech addressed to the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization. In that speech he warned that, “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.”
What do you make of Pope Leo XIV’s comments?
Well, all this has been known, so this is simply re-iterating the truth that the humanity has already discovered, often at great cost. As George Orwell said: "The people will believe what the media tells them they believe".
He addressed this in Animal Farm and in 1984, where he described an essential part of the process: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."
Again, Orwell merely observed and succinctly described the processes within the communist regimes, so this is not some kind of hypothesis or fiction. Millions of people have this experience.