Pope Francis urges less dependence on digital media and more real communication

The Pope warned this Thursday of the dependence on digital media and urged greater real, face-to-face communication, among the wishes expressed by Francis for Lent, the period that anticipates Holy Week for Catholics.

In this message, which is published each year at the beginning of Lent, the pontiff asked: “Let us not get tired of fighting against concupiscence, that fragility that drives us towards selfishness and all kinds of evil, and that throughout the centuries has found different ways to plunge man into sin”.

“One of these ways is the risk of dependence on digital media, which impoverishes human relationships,” he said, adding that “Lent is a propitious time to counteract these pitfalls and cultivate, instead, a more comprehensive made of real, face-to-face encounters.”

Above all, he urged the faithful: take advantage of “this Lent to care for those close to us, to become neighbors to those brothers and sisters who are wounded on the path of life.”

“Lent is a propitious time to seek, and not avoid, those who are in need; to call, and not ignore, those who want to be heard and receive a good word; to visit, and not abandon, those who suffer from loneliness” , pleaded.

And he asked Catholics to put “into practice the call to do good to all” by taking “time to love the smallest and most defenseless, the abandoned and despised, those who are discriminated against and marginalized.”

“Too often, greed and arrogance prevail in our lives, the desire to have, to accumulate and to consume,” he observed in his message.

And for this reason he also invited in this season of Lent “to conversion, to a change of mentality, so that the truth and beauty of life do not lie so much in possessing as in giving, not so much in accumulating as in sowing good and share”.

“Sowing good for others frees us from the narrow logic of personal benefit and gives our actions the broad scope of gratuitousness, introducing us to the wonderful horizon of God’s benevolent designs,” he said.

And he lamented that sometimes: “in the face of bitter disappointment due to so many broken dreams, in the face of concern for the challenges that concern us, in the face of discouragement due to the poverty of our means, we are tempted to enclose ourselves in our own individualistic egoism and take refuge in indifference to the suffering of others”.

But he reiterated: “Let us not get tired of doing good.” (I)