By Dr. Dencio S. Acop
The Good News was never meant to be hoarded for oneself but to be shared with others! This is well and good but often, it has been easier said than done. How do we effectively communicate the Good News to people? If we look back in time, we’ll probably find out that it hasn’t been easy trying to get people to know the One True God. History is replete with these stories. But we know today that the work of global evangelization has generally been successful thanks to all the missionary work that’s been done. We also know that while people have been converted, often they go back to their old ways of unfaithfulness to God. This trend of ups and downs through the journey of faith is recurring. An example is the history of the faith at the place where Robert Francis Prevost was born and grew up in. In his book, Portrait of the First American Pope, Matthew Bunson wrote that: “In the mid-1950s, St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in the Riverdale neighborhood of Chicago was growing so fast it commissioned a new, expanded church building to accommodate worshippers … One generation later, in the 1980s, it had entered terminal decline. In 2011, it was closed. In 2025 — until May 8, when it became a source of international interest — it had been all but forgotten.” It is no coincidence that Robert Francis Prevost is now the new Pope. Just a review of all his credentials will quickly reveal it. But two factors stand out toward understanding the destiny that God has bestowed upon this man: rebooting the missionary work to include once prosperous Christian enclaves and effectively communicating the mystery of the Incarnate Son of God away from the mass media algorithm of the relativistic secular world.
The presence of pain and suffering in the world is the mystery that binds us to Jesus Christ. Without the crosses that we humans bear, Christ is farthest from our hearts. And given our imperfections, we just as easily forget God soon as our lives are better. This probably explains why Jesus is more popular in still developing countries in the global south, like Africa and South America, than in the advanced western world and global north. But there was also a time when even these advanced nations today relied mostly on God – when they were not yet as self-reliant as they are now. It is such a paradox that because of this phenomenon, once vibrant communities reached by Christian missionary work soon fall into decline with their faith supplanted by various worldly distractions. Meanwhile, the extension of this irony is that once pagan lands in turn become Christian and begin their journey towards prosperity enabled by a moral order. The man God chose to lead His flock is both a man of the global north as well as the global south. Quite literally, Robert Francis Prevost is both American and Peruvian. And he now also holds a third citizenship which is that of the Vatican State signifying the character of his universal mission to save the soul of humanity. To save the souls of the poor and marginalized, Fr. Prevost was sent to Peru as an Augustinian missionary where he spent most of his priesthood. Now as Pope, Leo XIV also needs to win back Christ in the land that once knew Him. In illo unum uno, he says, repeating the Augustinian motto — “In the One, we are one”. The Pope rightly observes that “once people lost their zeal for Jesus, they ended up losing each other”. And as Bunson wrote: “Those things we hold dear — our parishes, our schools, our communities — will fall apart, because we decided other things were more important”.
Deciding that nothing is more important than Christ begins with effectively communicating the mystery of the Incarnate Son of God away from the mass media algorithm of the relativistic secular world. While there is great anxiety surrounding the rapid advancement of technology drowning out the moral order, let nothing disturb us so long as we make Christ the center of our daily lives. Jesus is the only Way, Truth, and Life. AI or no AI, this Truth remains the same. While the world evolves materially, this evolution bears no match for spiritual growth that is firmly anchored in Christ and lived daily following his example. Thus, while there is a tendency to ride on the awesome power of present-day mass media to evangelize and defend the faith, this approach may not be as effective as we think. While such approach can have its positive effects on advancing the faith enabling its messaging to at least be at par with all other content, it could also be counter-productive in a way that dilutes the real mystery of the faith bringing it down to the level of the secular instead of reaching up to the supernatural. And this mystery is not necessarily the kind of miracles that’s rare but not impossible through the life of the church. For such a mystery may be that of uncommon valor in a sea of self-preservation. It can also be generosity through a world of selfish greed. Or it may be just self-denial in favor of others. How do we communicate such a mystery? Fr. Prevost before he became Pope Leo said in one of the synod sessions that: “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel… The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully ingrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective… The Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred literature into spectacle… As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.”
