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Chapter 2

Ecclesial Perspectives on Media and Communications

The Magisterium of the Catholic Church is no stranger to the questions posed in the preceding chapter. The church has long had an interest with the modes and effects of human communication, as well as with the consequences of technology. In general, magisterial documents have taken a cautiously optimistic approach toward the progress of communications and media. According to Gaudium et Spes, part of “reading the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the gospel” is being honest about the obvious shortcomings and problems of modern life. The document balances its enthusiasm with statements like the following:

[T]he modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred. Moreover, man is becoming aware that it is his responsibility to guide aright the forces which he has unleashed and which can enslave him or minister to him. That is why he is putting questions to himself.¹

The guiding vision for the church’s official commentary on media and communications, then, is a realistic vision of both its possibilities and its pitfalls. What follows is a review of ecclesial perspectives on three interrelated questions: technology, media, and communications. The least amount of attention is given to technology in explicit terms in the ecclesial documents. The church has been more explicit about addressing the questions of media and communications, questions they have tended to consider together under the category of “social communications” following the Second Vatican Council.

The question of “where to begin” on these topics is especially difficult. In 1766, Pope Clement XIII promulgated the encyclical Christianae Reipublicae in which he dealt primarily with the dangers of anti-Christian publications. He wrote that the Holy See is required to see that “the unaccustomed and offensive licentiousness of books which has emerged from hiding to cause ruin and desolation does not become more destructive as it triumphantly spreads abroad.”² Already in 1766 we have a document about the effects of technological progress (printed text and global travel) in the realm of communications on social relationships and personal morality. By mentioning this eighteenth-century document, I mean to promote a broader notion of media than one usually finds in both informal and formal discourses on the subject. It is a perspective that I believe is not only faithful to the church’s approach to media for the last century or so but also more helpful than somewhat popular but narrow approaches for understanding our current media environment.

Each of the texts reviewed in this chapter has its own historical context and any number of other important contextual factors (debates over true authorship, ecclesial politics, implicit audiences, etc.) that are beyond the scope of the current project. While I present these texts chronologically, it is by no means a sufficiently rich account of their historical contexts.³ Instead, the aim of this chapter is to discern the major themes in this body of church teaching, so as to elucidate, in a general way, the approach the church has taken toward issues of media and communications.

Taken as a whole, these ecclesial perspectives have variously focused on the church and the Incarnation as the theological loci for the question of media. To be sure, the former has been the most pronounced in these texts, while the latter has been more implicit and only emphasized in the latter part of the twentieth century. At its heart, this body of church teaching is about communion. Magisterial interest in communications revolves around a desire for true human community by virtue of shared imago Dei and salvation in the incarnate Word. Before the Second Vatican Council, the church focuses on communion within the context of the church alone, while after the council this communion extends outward to include the “whole human family.” Even the renewed focus on evangelization in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI can be understood in the context of this outward-looking desire for communion.

For the church, social communications, media, and their necessary technologies are always to be understood in terms of communion. Various means of communications are measured against the standard of the communion found in the sacramental life of the church. They are also judged for the degree to which they contribute to this communion. There are many characteristics of this communion, including virtue (Pius XI); art that is “subjected to the sweet yoke of the law of Christ” (Pius XII); building the common good (Second Vatican Council); self-communication in love (Pontifical Council for Social Communications); human freedom (John Paul II); upholding marriage and family (Benedict XVI); and engendering an encounter with Christ (Francis). As they draw on the Incarnation and the church to understand human communication, church leaders have had as their standard and their end “relationships among human beings with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.”⁴ To consider communications technology is to enter into much larger conversations about culture, politics, and economics. Therefore, although the most relevant texts come at the end of the twentieth century, this review thus includes sources that span the century as well as precede it.

Pre-Conciliar Ecclesial Perspectives

Ecclesial sources from the early twentieth century written on communications and technology focus primarily on the cinema and radio. Since its inception, film has garnered the attention of various religious authorities, including the Catholic Church. During the 1930s and 1940s, the church exercised its influence in this area through the Catholic Legion of Decency. As Anthony Burke Smith notes, “The Legion represents perhaps the most successful endeavor undertaken by the church to influence American culture.”⁵ It was a massive effort not only for censoring objectionable film but also for creating a culture of “decency” with regard to film within communities through the use of the Pledge in parishes.

The impetus for the Legion of Decency in the United States came from a more universal effort within the church to combat the moral evils of film, radio, and even books. In 1936, Pope Pius XI promulgated the encyclical Vigilanti Cura. The primary focus of Vigilanti Cura is the moral hazard of films. Objectionable films “are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family.”⁶ The Incarnation (any mention of Jesus, really) is noticeably absent from the text. The church, however, looms large. Bolstered by the success of the Legion of Decency in the United States, and owing to a historical context of the Catholic subculture (at least in the American Catholic Church), Pope Pius XI insisted that the church is obligated to protect people from the evils of cinema, even as he acknowledged its ability to be a “bearer of light and a positive guide to what is good.”⁷ As the century progressed, the church expanded its reflections on the possibilities of media without losing its concerns over the ways in which they can be employed for malicious ends.

The church comes to the fore in the section entitled “Concrete Proposals.” Pius XI began, notably, with the role of local pastors. He praised the Legion of Decency and its Pledge throughout the encyclical. Thus he proposed that “all Pastors will undertake to obtain each year from their people a pledge similar to the one already alluded to which is given by their American brothers and in which they promise to stay away from motion picture plays which are offensive to truth and to Christian morality.”⁸ He also suggested that each diocese employ the “Catholic press” to bolster this effort, specifically by “the prompt, regular and frequent publication of classified lists of motion picture plays.”⁹ Bishops should also set up an office for monitoring these lists, the administering of the Pledge, and the “existing motion picture theatres belonging to parishes.”¹⁰

At the center of each of these “concrete proposals” is confidence in the efficacy of the local community upon the cultural engagement of its members. To the twenty-first-century reader, such faith in this efficacy carries an air of nostalgia for Christendom. We rarely if ever have sustained experiences of the kind of local communities that would make such an effort feasible or even coherent. This is the standard of human communion for the church: relationships centered on Christ and in the sacramental life of the church embodied locally in parishes and extra-ecclesial social structures.¹¹

In his 1929 encyclical, Pope Pius XI made familiar comments about the moral effects of various media in the context of education. According to Divini illius Magistri, books provided unprecedented access due to their low prices, the cinema was the realm of unmitigated and often immoral display, and radio had immense and unequaled power of communication.¹² He wrote, “These most powerful means of publicity, which can be of great utility for instruction and education when directed by sound principles, are only too often used as an incentive to evil passions and greed for gain.”¹³ Media appeared in this encyclical for obvious reasons, as education involves necessarily the formation of young people and the use of particular media therein.

While the Incarnation is absent from the explicit argument of Vigilanti Cura, Pius XI referenced Christ generally throughout Divini illius Magistri. He named Christ as the ultimate teacher, beginning the encyclical by noting Jesus’ “tenderness and affection for children.”¹⁴ Jesus also commands the church, “Teach ye all nations,” which extends to all of the faithful and even those “outside the Fold.”¹⁵ Here he implied the image of the Good Shepherd, placing Christ at the center of the church’s educational mission, a mission that is particularly focused on steering young people away from objectionable media. Christ is also the image of virtue into which young people are to be formed: “By His example He is at the same time the universal model accessible to all, especially to the young in the period of His hidden life, a life of labor and obedience, adorned with all virtues, personal, domestic and social, before God and men.”¹⁶ Although Pius XI did not discuss the relationship of Christ as God made flesh, as God incarnate, explicitly, he did include Christ throughout the encyclical as his theological grounding for the church’s educational mission.

As in Vigilanti Cura, the efficacy of the church looms large in Divini illius Magistri. Somewhat more familiar to contemporary readers, Catholic education is presented as divinely mandated and especially urgent for the salvation of souls. Education, as well as the means of communication that participate in and aid it, is a matter of cultivating true communion, sustained by the sacramental life of the church. Divini illius Magistri picked up on the social structure envisioned by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, emphasizing the different levels of society, or more properly, the three interrelated kinds of society: “Education is essentially a social and not a mere individual activity. Now there are three necessary societies, distinct from one another and yet harmoniously combined by God, into which man is born: two, namely the family and civil society, belong to the natural order; the third, the church, to the supernatural order.”¹⁷ The family is central to Christian education and has right to educate its children: “The family therefore holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.”¹⁸

The encyclical then connects the rights of the family and the church in terms of education, emphasizing that civil authority has a role in education but only as it befits the mission of education established by God within the church and family. Between church and family is the fabric of the local community. Early in the encyclical, Pius XI writes, “We implore pastors of souls, by every means in their power, by instructions and catechisms, by word of mouth and written articles widely distributed, to warn Christian parents of their grave obligations.”¹⁹ Coupled with the “concrete proposals” of Vigilanti Cura, this warning to pastors is all set against the backdrop of “the dangers of moral and religious shipwreck” found in books, radio programs and film. To steer young Catholics—all Catholics—away from such perilous content one needs the church, instantiated in the thick matrix of local pastors, the local parish, and the family.

Near the middle of the twentieth century, television coupled the intimacy of the family radio with the visual elements of film, bringing the moral dangers of the earlier media into the very heart of the home. In 1957, Pope Pius XII addressed film, radio, and even television in Miranda Prorsus. Pius XII extended his predecessor’s comments about motion pictures into various forms of electronic media. He conveyed the persistent worry from the Holy See to extol the virtues of such media and enumerate their dangers: “From the time when these arts first came into use, the church welcomed them, not only with great joy but also with a motherly care and watchfulness, having in mind to protect her children from every danger as they set out on this new path of progress.”²⁰ Miranda Prorsus continued the project of Vigilanti Cura insofar as it pays close attention to the ways in which these media shape the morals of media consumers. The church, therefore, has the solemn duty of ensuring that those entrusted to its care do not find themselves in the near occasion of sin by virtue of any given film, radio, or television program.

In assessing the situation before him, Pius XII understood the possibilities and promises of media technology to go beyond education and formation, the foci of his predecessor. He connected the media to the mission of the church itself: “Much more easily than by printed books these technical arts can assuredly provide opportunities for men to meet and unite in common effort.”²¹ While Miranda Prorsus continued to assert the role of bishops and priests in steering the community toward proper use of the media, the emphasis on each medium considered—television, film, and radio—was broader and more universal in its ecclesial vision. Pius XII went on, “Since this purpose is essentially connected with the advancement of the civilization of all peoples the Catholic Church—which, by the charge committed to it, embraces the whole human race—desires to turn it to the extension and furthering of benefits worthy of the name.”²²

Miranda Prorsus also placed more emphasis on the responsibility of individual media consumers. This seems like a natural evolution in emphasis, given the shift from film to television as the medium of central concern. The difference, according to Miranda Prorsus, is that “Television shares, in a sense, in the nature and special power of sound broadcasting, for it is directed towards men in their own homes rather than in theatres.”²³ As essentially public, film lends itself to a more communal effort, introduced and encouraged by the parish priest. Television, on the other hand, concerns the daily choices of individuals and families, free from the accountability of publicly entering a theatre.

On the surface, these relatively early encyclicals on media appear to sacrifice any theological account of media or technology itself for an intense insistence on the morality of particular products. That is, most of both Miranda Prorsus and Vigilanti Cura addressed how pastors (bishops and priests) should work toward encouraging (or insisting upon) responsible and moral media consumption. One is tempted to characterize these texts as antiquated moral pronouncements that reflect a nostalgic yearning for a time when the church was a cultural and political force which could insist upon the “objective moral order” as the standard for all media production. But within these texts emerges a distinctly theological account of these media and their concomitant technologies, especially in Miranda Prorsus. Before attending to the moral questions of any particular medium, Pius XII writes, “From the drawings and inscriptions of the most ancient times down to the latest technical devices, all instruments of human communication inevitably have as their aim, the lofty purpose of revealing men as in some way the assistants of God.”²⁴ One can see the germ of this theological understanding of media technologies in Pius XI, who writes that “the essential purpose of art, its raison d’etre, is to assist in the perfection of the moral personality.”²⁵ While Pius XII continued this emphasis on the relationship between media and morality, he furthered the theological basis for it by including a more detailed account of how the media actually work and of their relationship to a theological anthropology:

Among the various technical arts which transmit the ideas of men those occupy a special place today, as We said, which communicate as widely as possible news of all kinds to ears and eyes by means of sounds and pictures. This manner of spreading pictures and sounds, so far as the spirit is concerned is supremely adapted to the nature of men, as Aquinas says: ‘But it is natural to man to come to things of the understanding through things of sense; for all our knowledge has its origin in a sense.’ Indeed, the sense of sight, as being more noble and honorable than other sense, more easily leads to a knowledge of spiritual things.²⁶

What this captures, even at such an early date in the influence of these various media, is the degree to which communications technology are part of the economy of grace. The wisdom of these papal statements is that while they understand such media to be “instruments,” they do not argue for their inherent neutrality. Instead, they recognized the way in which their existence actually tells us something about what it means to be human, specifically what it means to be made in the image of God. This emphasis is hard to find in contemporary theological engagements with the internet. There is an implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that the internet and its culture is somewhat of an aberration, something separate from what we might call “religious” or “Christian.” Consequently, the practical recommendations from a Christian perspective seek to add to online life, searching for ways to carve out a distinctly Christian space within cyberspace. In contrast, these ecclesial perspectives challenge us to engage in discourse that situates media—presumably to include the internet—within the very fabric of the created universe, as a vital part of human history and culture, and even a mediator of “spiritual things.”

Therefore, one can argue that a deeply incarnational theology, while not explicit, undergirds these early ecclesial perspectives on media. By taking on human flesh, God has redeemed the world and made it possible for even the most banal aspects of creation to participate in the economy of grace. This is the incarnational theology on which the sacramental life is based. These documents are more explicit in explaining the place of the church in their particular cultural situations with regard to media. On the level of the church universal, the documents reflect an optimism about the relationship between the church and the rest of society that is difficult to maintain in our hyper-pluralistic culture today. On the level of the local church community, much emphasis is placed on the roles of bishops and priests to affect the media consumption of average Catholics. An example of this local effort would be the Pledge to stay away from immoral films. At the time of their writing, these documents could insist upon such cultural influence on the part of the church precisely because of the thick parish communities in which people lived. As the century progressed, ecclesial perspectives on media and communications would continue to point out both the positives and negatives of media. They would also more explicitly draw upon an incarnational perspective for their understanding of communications itself. With regard to church, they would continue to make suggestions for the diocesan and parish levels, but would extend the ecclesial vision of Miranda Prorsus by emphasizing the role of the media in the themes of the common good and solidarity.

Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Ecclesial Perspectives

A mere six years after Miranda Prorsus, the Second Vatican Council produced Inter Mirifica, the Decree on the Means of Social Communication. This document is important for several reasons. First, it introduces the phrase “social communications,” which is an acknowledgment of the relative insufficiency of “media” or “mass media.” This is immensely helpful for applying its ideas to current technologies like the internet.²⁷ Secondly, it establishes a World Day of Communications,²⁸ which becomes an annual occasion for the current pope to give some commentary, however brief, on the issue of communications technology. Thirdly, it ensures that social communications will remain a focus for the church by proposing a “special office of the Holy See” on the topic. This will later become the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, responsible for some of the most important (and theologically rich) ecclesial commentary on media and communications to date.

Despite these developments, Inter Mirifica remains, in the words of John O’Malley, “virtually forgotten.”²⁹ Discussion of the decree was remarkably short and “many felt that the council was wasting its time discussing mass communications.”³⁰ Even by those who did not share this view, the final document was not entirely well received. Three American journalists—John Cogley (Commonweal), Robert Kaiser (Time and Life), and Michael Novak (The New Republic)—released a statement calling the document “hopelessly abstract” and one “that may be cited as a classic example of how the Second Vatican Council failed to come to grips with the world around it.”³¹ One way to interpret the place of the decree in the context of the council as a whole is that it is an early product of the council and as such, does not reflect the characteristic “voice” of later documents.³² Specifically, while the title of the document reflects an “openness and wonder,” the document itself “seems at times more like a laying down of rules.”³³

Admitting obvious differences in tone from later conciliar documents, it is important to note that Inter Mirifica begins with an optimistic statement not unlike those found in the other documents produced by the Second Vatican Council: “Man’s genius has, with God’s help, produced marvelous technical inventions from creation, especially in our times.”³⁴ What follows is a sort of “updated” version of the cautious tone of Miranda Prorsus and Vigilanti Cura. The church is aware of the possibilities of social communications, “but the Church also knows that man can use them in ways that are contrary to the Creator’s design and damaging to himself.”³⁵ Unlike Miranda Prorsus, which is organized by type of media, Inter Mirifica focuses on what the drafters have deemed to be the most relevant aspects of these media for social communications: information, art and the moral law, public opinion, and the role of civil authorities. The document continues the focus of its predecessors on morality to the media that are its subject, but does more to outline the creative possibilities of the media in question. The document expresses great confidence in the role of information in the modern world: “If news or facts and happenings is communicated publicly and without delay, every individual will have permanent access to sufficient information and thus will be enabled to contribute effectively to the common good.”³⁶

The document goes on to establish the absolute primacy of the objective moral order, which is “superior to and is capable of harmonizing all forms of human activity, not excepting art, no matter how noble in themselves.”³⁷ Once again, we might be tempted to move quickly past such pronouncements as woefully nostalgic of a time and place when and where the church had social capital to exercise such authority; pluralism, among other cultural dynamisms, has long precluded such influence. However, there is an interesting assumption at work in this section of the document. Instead of sequestering media to a realm of neutrality from which the church can then pull for its own uses, it is quite clear here that the church sees all of human activity within the purview of its moral care. The language that Inter Mirifica uses here is notably stronger than earlier ecclesial statements. The council fathers write, “It is the Church’s birthright to use and own any of these media which are necessary or useful for the formation of Christians and for pastoral activity.”³⁸ Thus even in a tone that reflected previous approaches to the pastoral uses of media, Inter Mirifica moved toward a more integrated view of the relationship between the church and media.³⁹

Once again, the implication is that media are neither neutral tools nor essentially evil spaces into which the church must interject itself. Instead, Inter Mirifica and the earlier papal encyclicals present a view of these media as constitutive of both creation and of human activity. This is an immensely important assumption for any theologically informed commentary on modern media and technology. Theologians and pastors would do well to remember the church’s position here, developing steadily in these documents from Vigilanti Cura onward.

While Inter Mirifica is important for establishing the terms for the ecclesial discussion of social communications, the discussion is taken up more fully by the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications’ Pastoral Instruction, Communio et Progressio in 1971. This document details the various topics introduced by Inter Mirifica, specifically public opinion, freedom of information, and the relationship between and roles of “communicators” and “recipients.” In some ways, public opinion foregrounds the entire discussion of social communications in Communio et Progressio. The document understands “the means of social communications” as “a public forum where every man may exchange ideas.”⁴⁰ Public opinion is a reflection of the exercise of various freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of information. One cannot form an opinion without access to accurate and timely information: “Freedom of opinion and the right to be informed go hand in hand.”⁴¹ This right carries the duty of being well-informed. According to the text, a person “can freely choose whatever means best suit his needs both personal and social.”⁴² Such freedoms, however, are not “limitless” and must be seen in the context of other rights, namely “the right of truth,” “the right of privacy,” and “the right of secrecy which obtains if necessity or professional duty or the common good itself requires it.”⁴³ Consequently, the various actors within the means of social communications have particular freedoms and duties associated with their roles, be they “communicators” or “recipients.”

If any aspect of these two documents is problematic for the application of ecclesial sources to the contemporary technological moment, it is these categories of “communicators” and “recipients.” They are particularly illustrative of a view of media that understands them as the conduits of products (news pieces, programs, texts, etc.) by one group of people (communicators) to be consumed or received by the other (recipients). Such is the standard understanding of “mass media”: media that is intended for and distributed to large masses of people. The concept of “social communications” provided by Inter Mirifica and expanded by Communio et Progressio is somewhat able to capture the dynamism of communications technologies beyond mass media. The communicator/recipient binary, however, is less helpful given the fluidity of such roles in the internet age. User behavior online does not fall neatly into either of these categories. At one moment, I am a communicator, and the next, I am a recipient. Even more complicated is the fact that in one act, I can be both. Commenting on an online article is difficult to classify along the communicator/recipient binary. I am a communicator because I am producing text to be read by others, yet by commenting, I am displaying an interaction with the original article, performing my role as recipient. The inherent interactivity of online life, especially with the advent and growth of “social media,” betrays a problem with these categories as we move beyond “mass media.” A choice presents itself: do we simply apply the duties and responsibilities of both categories to all internet users? Or are these categories too beholden to a perspective of media technologies as part of what we call “mass media”?

In addition to understanding media as primarily “mass media,” another important assumption of the ecclesial perspectives comes to light in Communio et Progressio. The latter half of the document outlines the responsibilities of the “civil authorities,” as well as Catholics and other religious people who find themselves in a position to affect media. Coupled with the earlier discussion of “public opinion,” the implication here is that the spheres of the church and the civil authority meet each other in a public space capable of negotiating the interests and values of each party. The insistence on public opinion is particularly telling. What good is a well-informed opinion if there is no place to express that opinion? Such expression seems reserved for an as yet undefined “public.” This comes to light when the Commission describes the role of the so-called recipients:

Recipients can be described as active when they know how to interpret communications accurately and so can judge them in the light of their origin, background and total context. They will be active when they make their selection judiciously and critically, when they fill out incomplete information that comes their way with more news which they themselves have obtained from other sources, and finally, when they are ready to make their view heard in public, whether they agree, or partly agree or totally disagree.⁴⁴

What exactly defines the social space in which these recipients are “to make their view heard in public”? In addition to complicating the communicator/recipient binary, the internet has also complicated the public/private binary on which so much of the ecclesial commentary on society and culture has relied. Communio et Progressio is often considered one of the most optimistic ecclesial perspectives on communications technology. It is also idealistic when it comes to the structure of society, specifically because of its perception of a neutral “public” or “civil” space in which the church can express its position toward the various media of concern.

Communio et Progressio is a detailed discussion of social communications which flows from not only Inter Mirifica but also from “Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” The document takes its primary task from Inter Mirifica, attempting to provide theological and ecclesial commentary on topics related to social communications that are only briefly introduced at the Council through Inter Mirifica. In at least two ways, however, Communio et Progressio is also a product of the church-world relationship envisioned by Gaudium et Spes. According to the Council fathers as expressed in the Pastoral Constitution, the church “must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its expectations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics.”⁴⁵ Gaudium et Spes addresses many aspects of the modern world, and in so doing, provides an example for subsequent ecclesial texts of creative engagement with the “dramatic characteristics” of the modern world. When the Pontifical Commission drafts Communio et Progressio in 1971, then, they do so in the shadow of both Inter Mirifica and Gaudium et Spes. The effect of the latter is to encourage and even demand of the Pontifical Commission a perspective on this important aspect of culture and human history—the media—that is well informed on its lived realities, both positive and negative.

Communio et Progressio insists that social communications be employed for furthering the common good, specifically through education and informing the public opinion. When read as a particular application of the theological project of Gaudium et Spes, the eschatological implications of the ecclesial perspective on social communications from this period come to light. Chapter 3 of Gaudium et Spes, “Man’s Activity Throughout the World,” argues for the place of all of this “feverish activity” of humanity in salvation history. This section of the document is theologically rich and pertinent to the current project:

[F]ar from thinking that works produced by man’s own talent and energy are in opposition to God’s power, and that the rational creature exists as a kind of rival to the Creator, Christians are convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God’s greatness and the flowering of his own mysterious design. For the greater man’s power becomes, the farther his individual and community responsibility extends.⁴⁶

This perspective applies to any number of human activities; Gaudium et Spes is not referring just to art or labor or technology, but appears to put the entirety of human activity within the “realization in history of the divine plan.”⁴⁷ When taking on the specific activity of social communications, then, Communio et Progressio applies this perspective to the various and increasing number of media in the twentieth century. In addition to the relative optimism of Gaudium et Spes, Communio et Progressio also adopts the language of rights and responsibilities, a persistent theme in Catholic social thought since Rerum Novarum. Gaudium et Spes discusses the rights of humans in the modern world; Communio et Progressio asserts the particular rights to information and expression. Gaudium et Spes argues that the common good and the absolute inviolability of human dignity should guide all of human activity, even and especially in light of such rapid change and progress; Communio et Progressio, as noted above, maintains that “the right to information is not limitless,” and that these limits are dictated by a respect for the common good and for the dignity of all human life.

Here the document reflects the aforementioned emphasis on communion. The documents from the Second Vatican Council from which Communio et Progressio takes its cues include human solidarity and the global common good as a way of extending the standard of true communion to the whole world. While the sacramental life of the church instituted by Christ is the performative means of communion for the baptized, all human beings share the image of God, which gives each person an inherent dignity as well as the innate desire for true relationships with other people and with the divine. Again, as social communications become the focus of these mid-century- and late-twentieth-century documents, they are discussed within the context of building communion both within and outside of the church that is grounded in the relationship to the divine which all human beings share in Christ’s redemption.⁴⁸