Pope: 'Virtual connection' cannot replace human relationships
By Daniele Piccini
Pope Leo has said that the digital world “poses a challenge even for the consecrated.”
He was speaking on the afternoon of November 26 in the Vatican’s Synod Hall, in an address to roughly 160 participants in the 104th Assembly of the Union of Superiors General (USG).
The gathering, entitled “Connected Faith: Living Prayer in the Digital Age,” is being held outside Rome from November 26 to 28.
The promises of technology
In his message, the Pope stressed that “it would be shortsighted to ignore the extraordinary opportunities [technology] offers for communion and mission, enabling us to reach people far away—even those who, by ordinary means, struggle to come close to our communities.”
Pope Leo himself recently made use of such opportunities when he connected via livestream from the Vatican with 16,000 young people attending the National Catholic Youth Conference at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, USA.
The risks
This form of engagement, however, the Pope warned, can also “strongly influence— and not always for the better—our way of building and maintaining relationships.”
There is a real temptation, he said, “to replace actual human relationships with mere virtual connections,” precisely when what is needed is “presence, patient and prolonged listening, and deep sharing of ideas and feelings.”
He drew again on Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Christus vivit to emphasize that traditional instruments of communion—Chapters, Councils, Canonical Visits and formative gatherings—cannot be relegated to the digital world.
Pope Leo went on to caution against prioritising convenience and efficiency when pastoral care is at stake. We must resist the presumption “that we are managers of multiple services,” or that we can allow ourselves to be “dazzled by the spotlight of efficiency, numbed by the fumes of compromise.”
The danger, he said, is that “we stall, or else turn our pilgrim journey into a frantic, exhausting race, forgetful of its source and its destination.”
Walking together
What is essential, the Pope stressed, is walking together—as a community, as brothers. Pope Leo cited Pope Francis' encyclical Fratelli tutti, in which he “invited us to meet one another in a ‘we’ that is stronger than a collection of small individual selves,” and “to discover and convey the mystique of living together.”
The Church, Pope Leo recalled, is “a communal and historical subject of synodality,” an organism in which “bonds are transfigured into sacred ties, into channels of grace.”
Relationship with God
The relationship it is most important to cultivate, the Pope underscored, is our relationship with God. This is why “prayer is fundamental in the life of every consecrated person”—that “relational space in which the heart opens to the Lord, learning to ask and to receive with trust.”
In prayer, Leo XIV added, “we bear witness to who we truly are: creatures in need of everything, abandoned to the provident and benevolent hands of the Creator.”
Navigating between digital tools and authentic relationships—“being together to speak and to listen,” in a balance of “light and shadow”—the Pope finally urged his listeners to embrace the challenge “of integrating nova et vetera,” the new and the old, “preserving and nurturing the relationship with God and with one another, without neglecting or burying, out of laziness or fear, the new talents that the Lord places in our hands”.
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