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I think you can watch a performance of this piece on youtube- and to do so this week might be a way of responding to Pope Benedict’s message for World Communications Day. In this reflection, entitled “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelisation”, he explores the ‘relationship between silence and word, two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another’.

The Holy Father continues: “Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression.... When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages... For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.”

What the Pope is not saying is that all ‘messages and information’ should be shunned: the internet is a powerful tool of evangelisation, not least for disseminating messages such as the one for World Communications Day! But he is rightly sounding a warning that the modern phenomenon of continuous and instant information and communication is not without its risks. It can change the way individuals and societies relate and function, and not always for the better. Maybe he is challenging us to see if we can find time to turn off the mobile phone, to pause from Facebook, and in the ensuing silence to ponder more attentively on the things of God.

If you’d like to read the whole message for World Communications Day, you can find it on the Vatican website (go to www.vatican.va and search for ‘World Communications Day 2012’), or if you are reading this on our Cathedral website, the direct link is: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120124_46th-world-communications-day_en.html.
Fr Alexander Master

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