“Silence and Word" for World Communications Day 2012

May 19, 2012: The church celebrates the 46th World Communications Day on Sunday. Pope Benedict XVI has chosen the theme "Silence and Word: path of evangelization" for this year. World communications day is celebrated every year on the Sunday before Pentecost.

The Pope released his message earlier for the occasion on January 24, the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers. In the message, the value of silence is presented, not as a simple antidote to the constant flow of information which characterizes today’s society, but as an essential tool to help us understand and welcome the Word of God into our lives.

Reflecting on Pope’s message, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said that silence favours habits of discernment and reflection, and hence we ought not to think in terms of a dualism, but in terms of the complementary nature of silence and words. When they are held in balance, they serve to enrich the value of communication and make it a key factor in the service of the new evangelization.

Commenting on the this year’s theme, Fr. Jean-Pierre Ruiz, biblical scholar and Theology professor at St. John's University in New York, and an expert in new media, said that the Pope’s choice of “silence and word” as a theme for evangelization and communication is “strangely eloquent…because we live in a world where words in a certain sense have become a cheap commodity and where people say very often much less than they actually mean.”

If we were to reduce communications to just mere words, I think we would be impoverished’, Fr. Ruiz added.