Vatican City - On the day on which the Church celebrates Saint Francis de Sales, patron of journalists and communication, Pope Leo XIV signed the Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications. The text places at its centre a key word: custody.
To safeguard the person even before the content; to safeguard face and voice at a time when technology can reproduce them, simulate them, and use them. The Pope does not speak as a technician, but as a pastor: he points to an anthropological stake that concerns those who communicate, those who inform, and those who receive news.
“Face and voice are sacred”: communication as the space of the person
The Message opens with a fundamental consideration: “The face and the voice are unique, distinctive traits of every person; they manifest an irreducible identity and are the constitutive element of every encounter.” The Pope links this uniqueness to the Christian tradition and to revelation: “Face and voice are sacred. They have been given to us by God, who created us in his image and likeness.” For this reason, when communication loses its reference to the person, the very way of inhabiting the world is altered. Leo XIV insists that the human being is not a predetermined product: “We are not a species made up of biochemical algorithms, defined in advance. Each of us has an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation.” From this perspective, informing and communicating are not merely skills: they become responsibilities before the dignity of the other.
The challenge of AI: when simulation invades human relationships
The Pope enters the heart of a contemporary issue on which he is also working with a view to offering an encyclical: digital technology and artificial intelligence systems. The risk, he warns, concerns the very pillars of coexistence and even the depth of relationships: “Digital technology, if we fail in this custody, risks radically altering some of the fundamental pillars of human civilisation.” Then comes a sentence that sounds like an alarm bell for those working in the media: “By simulating human voices and faces… systems known as artificial intelligence… also invade the deepest level of communication, that of the relationship between human persons.” For Leo XIV, the issue cannot be reduced to efficiency: “The challenge, therefore, is not technological but anthropological.” Technology must be welcomed with discernment, without closing our eyes to “critical points, opacity, risks.”
“Do not renounce your own thinking”: algorithms, bubbles and polarisation
Part of the text is devoted to what is already happening today within information flows. The Pope describes algorithms as mechanisms designed to maximise attention: “algorithms designed to maximise engagement… reward rapid emotions and penalise… the effort to understand and reflect.” Silere non possum has often highlighted these risks, warning against blogs and social media pages that encourage insults, conflict, and polarisation. The result, Leo explains, is a form of communication that divides: “By enclosing groups of people in bubbles of easy consensus and easy indignation… social polarisation increases.” To this dynamic is added a naïve relationship with AI: reliance on an “all-knowing friend”, an “oracle of every piece of advice”, capable of wearing down the capacity for analytical and creative thinking. The warning is explicit: “Withdrawing from the effort of one’s own thinking… risks… eroding our cognitive, emotional and communicative capacities.” Beneath the surface lies a precise message for information professionals: without critical thinking, the media ecosystem becomes fragile.
Fiction, deepfakes and “hallucinations”: the crisis of verification
Leo XIV also addresses the grey area between reality and fiction, where simulation makes everything more uncertain: “It becomes… increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings or with ‘bots’.” The Pope warns about hidden persuasion and about the capacity of models to “imitate human feelings and thus simulate a relationship”, with a particular impact on vulnerable people. Then comes distortion: biases and stereotypesembedded in systems, capable of “manipulating our thinking” and “deepening inequalities”. Finally, there is the point that directly touches the journalistic profession: lack of accuracy and so-called “hallucinations”. Here Leo XIV links the unreliability of automated responses to the crisis of on-the-ground journalism and to verification: “A lack of verification of sources… can foster an even more fertile ground for disinformation, causing… distrust, disorientation and insecurity.” It is a call to rebuild authority through method and presence in the places where events actually occur. The results of this crude form of journalism, aimed more at stirring up crowds than informing them, were also evident in recent hours, when some self-styled title-holders passed off as “scoops” false information copied from circulating tweets.
Responsibility, cooperation, education: the path towards an “alliance”
The Pope does not propose alarmism, but rather a way of governing complexity: a possible “alliance”, founded on three pillars: responsibility, cooperation and education.
Responsibility concerns everyone: from platforms, called not to reduce their strategies to the “maximisation of profit”, to developers, from whom “transparency and social responsibility” are required, and legislators, tasked with safeguarding human dignity. For the world of information, this passage serves as an editorial and professional guideline: “Media and communication companies cannot… allow algorithms… to prevail over fidelity to their professional values, directed towards the search for truth.” And again: “Public trust is earned through accuracy and transparency.” Content generated or manipulated by AI “must be flagged and distinguished”, and information is defined without ambiguity: “Information is a public good.”
Saint Francis de Sales, patron of journalists: the written word as mission
This remarkable Message of the Holy Father, which as usual touches the nerve centres of the issue, is signed today on the feast of Saint Francis de Sales, patron of journalists. He is a figure who combines gentleness, pastoral intelligence and an innovative use of communication. Born in 1567 at the Château de Sales in Thorens (Upper Savoy), he grew up amid family expectations of a brilliant career. He studied law in Padua, but chose the priesthood. He became Bishop of Geneva in 1602, in a context marked by the presence of Protestant reformers inspired by John Calvin; for this reason, he transferred his see to Annecy. His strength lay in his capacity for dialogue and persuasion, exercised through preaching and the written word: he succeeded in bringing thousands of Calvinists back to Catholicism.
To reach more people, he devised a means of mass communication: the pamphlet. He wrote short texts, had them printed, and distributed them on walls and under the doors of homes. It is also for this reason that he is recognised as the patron of journalists, writers, the press and the mass media. In 1610 he founded, together with Jane Frances de Chantal, the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary; he wrote more than two thousand letters and works such as Introduction to the Devout Life and the Treatise on the Love of God. He died in Lyon on 28 December 1622, leaving behind a simple and enduring lesson: to communicate means to reach people where they live, with words that do not crush, but offer hope. In this light, the Message of Leo XIV appears as continuity: to safeguard communication as the space of the person, so that technology does not take the place of the human, but serves it.
fr.C.V.
Silere non possum