Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from a “A new world and a new mission,” originally published in Thinking Faith on June 27, 2024. It is used with permission.
A new pastoral field for the church is mission in the digital environment. More simply, this can be called the digital mission. Reflection on this new field can benefit from a dialogue with the thought of the Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J., and specifically with his reflections on “Communications” in Chapter 14 of his 1972 work, Method in Theology.
At the start of 2024, some 5.35 billion people, 66 percent of the world, had access to the internet and social media. This, along with the uptake of artificial intelligence, is changing our reality in many more ways than we could previously have imagined.
The rapidly evolving digital environment is “increasingly present in the lives of children and families. While it has great potential to improve people's lives, it can also cause harm and injury,” noted the Synthesis Report that followed the October 2023 Synod gathering in Rome. Now, that report states, “many young people have abandoned the physical spaces of Church” and favor “instead online spaces.”
Such ambiguous and disconcerting phenomena are what the Second Vatican Council would include under “the signs of the times.” They can also rank among “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age” that the council affirmed in “Gaudium et Spes” as the church’s own deep concerns and as areas where we should help make Christ present. One of the study groups (hereafter Study Group Three) for questions raised in the first session of the Synod on Synodality is working to help us make these phenomena our own and respond as a more synodal, more missionary church.
Providentially, the October 2023 Synod gathering was apprised of such signs, hopes and anxieties under the suggestive image of a new continent to be evangelized and brought sacramentally into the church: “The digital mission is not merely a tool for evangelization, but it is ‘a space, a territory… a new world for the Church of communion and mission,” says the report from Study Group Three. This discovery (astonishing for the majority of Synod delegates) triggered in all of us—beginning with Pope Francis—deep and lively feelings of faith, hope, love and zeal.
So here, a bit more concretely, are our two reciprocal questions:
- How does Lonergan’s argument in his chapter on communications help us to grasp the importance for the church of carrying out the mission of proclaiming the Gospel also in the digital environment? How, consciously and intelligently, are we to include the digital mission in how the church is becoming synodal?
- How does this decisive moment in church history—unimagined in Lonergan’s time—draw new meaning from his work on communications? How does it require new collaborative work of theologians and others in the human sciences and history?
Inculturation
The digital environment is a culture, a “place,” where people—all of us—spend a significant part of our lives. Not just a tool or a technology, “digital culture represents a fundamental change in the way we conceive of reality and consequently relate to ourselves, one another, our surroundings, and even to God,” in the words of Study Group Three. It is having “a profound impact on ideas of time and space, on our self-understanding, our understanding of others and the world, and our ability to communicate, learn, be informed and enter into relationship with others.”
Nevertheless, to call these spaces “culture” can be disorienting, because until now, culture was always organically related to “real” space and place as its indispensable matrix. “The dualism between real and virtual does not adequately describe the reality and experience of people, especially the youngest, the so-called ‘digital natives,’” we read in the Synthesis Report after the October 2023 Synod Gathering. In recent years, we have seen that what starts and happens in the digital culture is generating great changes in the physical world: for example, the Arab Spring, the response to the death of George Floyd, the #MeToo movement, MrBeast’s YouTube channel and so many more.
Father Lonergan’s reasoning in Method in Theology a half-century ago expresses beautifully and precisely the challenge that the digital mission must face or, even more radically, the challenge that gives rise to the digital mission:
The Christian message is to be communicated to all nations. Such communication presupposes that preachers and teachers enlarge their horizon to include an accurate and intimate understanding of the culture and the language of the people they address. They must grasp the virtual resources of that culture and that language, and they must use those virtual resources creatively so that the Christian message becomes, not disruptive of the culture, not an alien patch superimposed upon it, but a line of development within the culture.
Lonergan’s use of “virtual” entirely predates today’s. Today, we would rephrase: “They must grasp the resources of that virtual culture and language.” Indeed, this is the main point of this essay.
As if responding to Lonergan read in today’s sense, the Synod says that the church is ready to carry out “the mission of proclaiming the Gospel also in the digital environment, which involves every aspect of human life and must therefore be recognized as a culture and not only as an area of activity.”
Evangelization
“The Christian Church is the community that results from the outer communication of Christ’s message and from the inner gift of God’s love. Since God can be counted on to bestow his grace….” Thus Lonergan in calling our attention to an effective communication of Christ’s message.
When did the church’s digital mission begin? One could argue that it started when social media, podcasts, blogs and YouTube were born. It was not waiting to be invented. Lay people, priests and religious did not wait for a mandate from the Vatican, their bishop or their superiors. Seeing souls wandering about in digital spaces in search of meaning, they took the initiative to introduce them to Christ’s love. The digital mission has been sprouting like the “seed scattered on the ground. Without [the farmer] knowing how, and whether sleeping or awake, day and night” (Mk 4: 26-27), the seeds quietly germinate and begin growing.
Recognizing what has already been born, Study Group Three is trying to prepare the ecclesial ways and means that will be needed to help that growth. Yet, a great majority of church leaders and church members have no idea about the digital continent waiting to be evangelized and ministered to, or of what digital missionaries and pastoralists—whether priest, religious or layperson, male or female, young or adult—are and what they do. In fact, these “digital workers” are offering significant pastoral formation and accompaniment to baptized Catholics online, as well as evangelization aimed at lapsed Catholics and people who do not know Christ.
Traditionally, missionaries have been sent by their bishop or superior who accompanies them from afar and occasionally visits them. Today, many Catholic influencers (wherever they reside, whatever their age and background) need to meet their respective bishops to begin to dialogue and to discover the ecclesial dimension, the indispensable basis, of their ministry. “We need to provide opportunities for recognizing, forming, and accompanying those already working as digital missionaries,” notes the Synthesis Report.
When the Synod approved the Synthesis Report, including Section 17 on “Mission in the Digital Environment,” it was not launching a brand new idea to be turned into reality, but rather learning from and building upon the impressive evangelization and ministry already spontaneously underway.
New frontiers
Let us return to the initial question: “What light do Lonergan’s observations on communications and the Synod’s Synthesis Report—and Study Group Three’s reflections on it—shed on one another?”
Lonergan sheds bright light on the magisterium of Pope Francis regarding the digital mission because his work helps us to grasp the necessity of understanding the new cultures within which people increasingly dwell and, indeed, are immersed—and, therefore, the very dynamic inculturation required. “Missionaries have always gone with Christ to new frontiers, while the Holy Spirit pushed and preceded them,” says the Synthesis Report. We can only regard this so-called new continent with the zeal of a Francis Xavier or a Mother Cabrini.
The digital mission is born of our faith and of the church, but in spontaneous and dispersed ways. Both the Holy Father and the Synod are asking for the digital mission to be recognized and incorporated into the visible church, and become a true ecclesial ministry and mission.
Is this the first time that very new forms of evangelization and ministry have been embraced so quickly by the church, with two official documents in less than six months since their introduction to the Synod? As the Synthesis Report notes, “we cannot evangelize digital culture without first understanding it”; Lonergan, too, would insist on understanding before communicating. Nevertheless, the digital mission with regard to communications, pastoral life, and pastoral or practical theology truly is an evangelical driving force that is only beginning to connect with and benefit from Lonergan’s insights.
Armed with the toolkit Lonergan provides with his Method in Theology, let us initiate a wise hermeneutics of the present, which includes accelerating rapid change and astonishing digital innovations. Let us appreciate their great potential for dialogue—for example, with the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anxieties of today’s people, and especially of the young. In a new mission for a new world, let us courageously and creatively offer the Word of Truth revealed in Christ Jesus.
