(Last February 8th, 2025, Fr. Emmanuel Alfonso SJ, Executive Director of Jesuit Communications, delivered this keynote address on the “Mission in the Digital Environment.”
Present at the event were media ministers from the northern central Luzon region, who convened for the inaugural Metropolitan General Assembly of all social communications and media ministers.)
Source: The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Fernando
Good morning, dear friends, brothers and sisters in the Lord. Mayap a yabak!
I am honored and humbled to be part of your event. Thanks so much. I was asked to give my cent’s worth about the mission, our mission in the Church today as we continue to navigate our way in this digital age. I would like to share three points from my own experience as a communicator and as head of a Church media NGO, the Jesuit Communications for the last 16 years.
First, and I would like to couch these mission thrusts into action words, engage with media, or for most of us here, continue to engage with media, whether traditional or new media. The eminent Philippine film director Marilou Diaz Abaya, who was board member of JesCom for more than 10 years, till she passed away, would tell me, there was a time in the history of the Philippines when all that the Filipinos had was the Gospel. Every Sunday, they would gather inside the Parish Church to listen to the Priest read and preach on the Gospel of Christ. There was no other story. Fast forward to today, in the midst of radio, television, film, and certainly the Internet and social media, the world has been inundated with so many stories that the Gospel that used to be at the center of people’s lives has been relegated to the peripheries. In the 1960s, we had Vatican II and there the council fathers, faced with the emerging media technologies like the television, decided to engage these human inventions. Inter mirifica, that is the title of the Vatican II document that addressed this particular concern, and it mean in the middle of beautiful or wonderful things. That is, they looked at these technologies and saw in them the great possibility of becoming effective instruments for evangelization. And so we say, media evangelization. Use of media to evangelize. That was in the 1960s. The Church was way ahead of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or Google or Facebook in this great realization and discovery. But again, fast forward to the present time and we find the Church lagging behind in the utilization of media for the spread of the good news. In the meantime, the top global corporations in the world are these Global Media Corporations—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter or X, etcetera. These corporations now dictate the agenda of the world. Look at President Elon Musk now of the USA or Facebook which continues to spread misinformation and disinformation around the globe, causing the tragic collapse of democratic governments. We were ahead of all of them. Our documents were clear and inspiring: what has happened to the Church? We failed to fully engage. We dilly-dallied. We vacillated. We hesitated. Our involvement was merely a token, if not symbolical. We never really took media seriously.
That is the moral of the story then, dear friends. We must engage media. As I share in my talks, we certainly must do this because it is where most of the world is, and especially the youth, which is precious to the Church. We realized this at Jesuit Communications in the late 90s. Although the Church media is important, like Radio Veritas, work is needed also in secular and commercial media. So our slogan has been “mainstreaming the Gospel.” I auditioned at ABS-CBN and for 15 years before it was shut down, I communicated with Church and unchurched. We created programs there like our daily prayer show Kapet Pandasal and the Word Exposed which catapulted the humble Bishop of Imus Cavite then now Cardinal Chito Tagle not only into national but global spotlight as well. Now his Sunday show airs in US, Australia, Canada, Europe. It has been very successful in the sense that donations from everywhere are sustaining the show. Engage. Engage we must especially now that the Church has become virtual as well, through the boundless world of the Internet.
Source: The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Fernando
Second missionary thrust, inspire. In his recent message on the occasion of the Jubilee Year for Communications held a week ago at the Vatican, Pope Francis challenged communicators and journalists in the room, tell stories of hope! He said the algorithm of news media, even before the advent of Facebook, was to focus on tragic or controversial stories, because as they said then scandal sells. And now with social media, this has worsened. Content from Russia, according to studies make us angry, while content from China makes us laugh. We are being manipulated or controlled and have become superficial people. Whatever happened to stories about the charity work of institutions, the bravery of missionaries, the honest examples of faithful public servants? In other words, where are the stories about our basic goodness, the triumph of the human spirit, love, hope? They are certainly there, but they are not told. In this year of hope and beyond, Pope Francis is telling us, no, instructing us, communicators in the Church, highlight the inspiring stories happening all around us. In a world of conflict and despair, we must be the beacons of hope, he says.
At Jesuit Communications, engaged as we are in secular media, we attempted to do just that. Tell our inspiring stories through film. First, we produced our film for TV project, Maging Akin Muli, which was directed by Marilou Diaz Abaya and was shot almost entirely in Betis Pampanga. The story was about a struggling seminarian. It was about our vocation not just for the priesthood but for the married state as well. That was 20 years ago and yet, newly ordained priests would come to me in various places and share with me that the film inspired them and gave them the strength to persevere in their vocation. Last year, in the annual conference of communicators from various dioceses in the Philippines, two young priests approached me and out of the blue thanked me for inspiring them daily with our Kapet pandasal. “Seminarista pa lang kami, padre, pinanunuod ka na namin.” Ouch, I said, that aged me. Ibig nyong sabihin, matanda na ako, mga hunghang! Fr Manolilng Francisco, our Jesuit musician responsible for the hits like Hindi Kita Malilimutan or Tanging Yaman or In Him Alone, experiences this kind of encounter all the time. Vacationing or Balikbayan Filipinos from the Middle East would visit him at the Ateneo all the time to thank him for his music. They would tell him that celebrating mass would be forbidden and so what they do in their gatherings is just listen to his music from Youtube or spotify and then offer prayers for one another. His music, they say, have kept them going and made them strong in the midst of the difficulties they lived through.
Yes, we engage in media not just to inform and entertain, but most especially to inspire, to encourage, to give hope. I am sure many of you have experienced being channels of all of that during the pandemic. In the first few days of the pandemic, when institutions were being closed or shut down like schools, the Ateneo Campus ministry asked me to broadcast in Radyo Katipunan, the Ateneo Campus Radio that JesCom established recently then, the Holy Eucharist. As a priest, it was all automatic to me. Okay, I said. It was perfunctory, it was a matter of performing simply a duty. Keeping the Faith, that’s the title I gave it. Little did I know that something ordinary and routinary to me was a lifesaver for many people. “our days which looked like the same in our homes day in and day out started with a purpose in a rather meaningless time, because we started with your Mass, dear father, wrote one of our “massgoers.” It provided as a lifeline to our family at that time, said another. I would have gone crazy already father if not for your Masses and Radyo Katipunan. Indeed, dear friends, during those difficult times of the pandemic, people survived because of their only connection to the whole world, media. May we continue then to be life-giving to our audiences.
Third and final missionary thrust, for me, unite. In 2015, when Pope Francis visited the Philippines, Bishop Mylo Vergara assigned me to head the coverage and documentation of his visit for the Church. We were of course working very closely with Radio and TV Malacanang, but the bishops wanted to have Church media to produce its own media content as well. How then do you begin to work with various Church media organizations? I remember when my predecessor at JesCom asked another Catholic media company if we could collaborate. He was simply told, “Why?” “What for?” At that time that media company was very successful producing catechetical materials, now it has fossilized, unable to transition into the digital age. But back to the daunting task of organizing various existing or surviving Catholic production companies for the Papal visit, I met with the directors, feed them of course, and initially there was resistance. Good thing I had the bishop to back me up on his mandate for us to work together. And so, after several more meetings and pizza and spaghetti, we finally became open to working together. I was able to assign them to as far as Tacloban and as a result, we produced a very moving and powerful documentary of the Pope’s visit to the Philippines. A testament to what we can do if the Church can only unite. And unite we must because the task before us is great and the resources we have are scarce. But if we can work together and learn to share, we can do as Mother Teresa would say, Something Beautiful for God.
St Paul tells us that God gives each one of us with special gifts. But all gifts are for the building up of the Church. All that we do in media or social media should strengthen the community of the faithful. With that in mind, we at Jesuit Communications thought about a special project for the 500th year anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines. It would be our most ambitious project ever. I thought during the time of a previous administration, the Philippine Church was vilified, humiliated, bullied. Even our Pope was verbally attacked. The President then even prophesied that the Church would be done and gone in twenty five-years. Consequently, the morale in the Church was very low. We thought this was regrettable and plain wrong because as historians would tell us, the Catholic church had a very important role to play in the eventual emergence of the Philippine nation. Specifically, the martyrdom of Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora, priests of the Catholic Church greatly contributed to the birth of the national consciousness. Rizal would say this when he dedicated El Filibusterismo to the memory of Gomburza. Yes, we had our faults like any institution, but we must take pride in this contribution. And so in 2023, we launched GomBurza at the Metro Manila Film Fest and for the next three months, it was the topic of heated and passionate conversations on Facebook, X, and other social media platforms. And priests would thank me for the movie. One even told me that the whole diocese had a movie night with Gomburza and when the lights came back at the end, they were all in different stages of crying or tearing up.
Certainly, dear friends we can do much more to build up one another. I have always believed that the Church is a sleeping giant. We have the biggest network of schools, parishes, charity institutions. If we can only unite and work together, we can harness great power for good.
So there you are, dear friends, three missionary thrusts for the Church in this wonderful world of digital communications. Engage, inspire, unite.
I would like to end on a note of urgency. Yuval Harrari is a famous Jewish historian. You should read him. In his recent book, Nexus, the history of communications, he writes that with the digital age, there is so much information out there. And yet, he adds, ninety percent of that information is just plain garbage. They do not contribute at all to human flourishing or the advancement of humanity. And yet they proliferate and influence many. I spoke with an Atenep Professor in sociology about this and he only confirmed it. He said, truth or morality or ethics, they do no longer appear or figure in the usual conversations of people now. In business, there is only the question of are you going to earn or not? In politics, the conversation is simply, will you win or lose in the elections? There is no mention any more of the truth or values or ethics. And sadly, that is the core as it were of our life and mission as Christians. Are we concerned at all that the truth has become marginalized? Jesus proclaims that he is the way, the truth and life. As communicators do we still proclaim that in a world now ruled by superficiality, lies and deception? Are we up for the fight? Or like Pilate, do we just shrug our shoulders and with tongue in cheek smugly say with the rest of the world, “And what is truth?”
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