Disarmed and disarming communication

For the European mentality it is very difficult to understand that there are countries where carrying weapons is legal. Here we don't shoot bullets, but we do believe we have the right to shoot words. They will say that there is a great distance between one thing and the other, but I don't see them as far apart.

We all have experience that there are words that kill, there are publications in social networks that destroy people; there are journalistic articles that seek to humiliate, trample, ridicule or discredit; there are radio and television interviews that only seek to make a show, to corner and make someone sound a big "zasca". And I am not referring, obviously, to the necessary social function of the press to be a watchdog of the powers that be, denouncing injustices and the unjust, but to those who make a show out of lynching in order to gain money, influence, followers or, what is worse, for pure pleasure. 

Those who act in this way take refuge in the right to freedom of expression, but, in my opinion, their reasons are as perverted as those of the rifle association when it claims the right to legitimate self-defense to promote the use of firearms from childhood. Every arms race is justified by the need to defend oneself, to arm oneself more than the enemy and, thus, we call "deterrent" the available nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the planet and devastating humanity without the need for a meteorite to fall like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. 

That verbal violence can end up in physical violence in certain circumstances is known to anyone who has a little bit of street smarts. That is why it worries me that there are those who use the media, especially if they define themselves as Catholics, to insult, defame and sow discord. Do they not understand the scope of their actions, the chain reaction they provoke and the scandal they produce?

Jesus could not have been clearer when he seriously condemned this attitude, saying: "You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not kill,' and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you, everyone who is carried away by anger against his brother will be prosecuted. And if one calls his brother a 'fool,' he will have to stand before the Sanhedrin, and if he calls him a 'fool,' he deserves the condemnation of the gehenna of fire." 

Does one really deserve hell just for calling someone an imbecile? What an exaggeration! Some of what was explained above Jesus would see when he said it, because what is in the heart is what then guides our actions. 

On June 1, we celebrated the World Communications DayThe media have precisely this power to bring the Good News to the whole world, and we should use them for good, both as professionals who have a responsibility, since we have been given the trigger in the form of a keyboard, microphone or camera, and as users who have a keyboard, microphone or camera on their controllers or on their dialer bar. Let us use them for good, both as professionals who have a responsibility, since we have been given the trigger in the form of a keyboard, microphone or camera; and as users who have in their remotes or in their bookmarks bar the key to give or take away the authority of those who misuse that nuclear button. 

One of the pope's first messages Leo XIVwas precisely along these lines. In his meeting with journalists who had covered the conclave, he told them: "Let us disarm communication of any prejudice, rancor, fanaticism and hatred; let us purify it of aggressiveness. No strident, forceful communication is useful, but rather a communication capable of listening, of picking up the voice of the weak who have no voice. Let us disarm words and we will contribute to disarm the earth. A disarmed and disarming communication allows us to share a different view of the world and to act in a way that is consistent with our human dignity.

Therefore, the Pope does not call us only to disarm our words in the sense of taking care that they do not hurt anyone, but, what is much more difficult, to make them disarming. And how is this done? Well, by not returning evil for evil, by responding with peace to those who try to start a verbal battle, by valuing the good in those who we may not like at all or who may be in our ideological antipodes... "Peace be with you all". This was the first greeting of the newly elected Pope from St. Peter's balcony. May we be able to transmit it, always, "to the ends of the earth".