The Challenges and Opportunities of The Digital Age

I. The Digital Age in Context

The age truly gained social momentum in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of personal computers and then decisively entered the public sphere in 1989, when the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, transforming the internet from a tool of academics and the military into a global public resource. The 1990s brought an explosion of internet adoption, e-commerce, and digital media. The launch of the smartphone in the mid-2000s marked a further turning point, ensuring that billions of people now carry the power of the internet at all times. By 2023, the number of smartphone users worldwide had surpassed 6.8 billion.³

The cultural and anthropological impact of this transformation is immense. Manuel Castells, in his landmark trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, argued that digital networks have given rise to a new form of society organised around information flows rather than physical geography.⁴ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee documented in The Second Machine Age how digital technologies generate unprecedented economic productivity while simultaneously widening inequality and displacing labour.⁵ The United Nations has consistently identified the ‘digital divide’, that is, the gap between those with and without meaningful access to digital technology, as a major driver of global injustice.⁶ The World Economic Forum projected that AI and automation could displace 85 million jobs globally while creating 97 million new ones by 2025, a transition whose social consequences for the most vulnerable remain largely unaddressed.⁷

The critical theological move, however, is to pass from an analysis of technology to an analysis of culture. As the Dicastery for Communication’s Towards Full Presence (2023) insists, the digital world is not merely a collection of tools but a genuine cultural environment – a place – with its own logic, its own formation of desires, and its own structuring of attention and relationship.⁸ Pope Francis expressed this with pastoral directness in his 2013 address to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications: The Church must enter this world, walk alongside its pilgrims, and offer the saving word of God.⁹ Pope Benedict XVI’s introduction of the concept of the ‘Digital Continent’ in 2009¹⁰ was more than a metaphor; it was a missiological claim. Just as the great missionary orders received new continents as their apostolic field, so the Church today is called to a genuinely missionary presence on this new continent, not simply replicating existing pastoral structures online, but engaging digital culture from within.

This missiological urgency has been given its most recent and most directly relevant expression by Pope Leo XIV. In his address to participants in the meeting promoted by the Union of Superiors General (26 November 2025), he offered a measured but clear summons to consecrated people:

information technology represents a challenge also for consecrated people. On the one hand, it offers immense opportunities for good, both for community life and for the apostolate. It would be shortsighted to ignore the extraordinary opportunities it provides to communion and the mission, allowing us to reach faraway people, to share faith through new languages, and to reach even those who, through ordinary means, find it difficult to approach our communities. At the same time, however, these resources can strongly influence, and not always for the better, the way we build and maintain relationships¹¹.

This address, the most recent magisterial word addressed directly to religious superiors on the digital theme, integrates the relational pastoral emphasis of Francis with the theological concerns of Benedict XVI, and it forms the living horizon of the present reflection. The following analysis organises its inquiry under the five dimensions most immediately pertinent to us: (1) mission and evangelisation, (2) community and fraternal life, (3) spirituality and prayer, (4) formation, and (5) ethics. A section on discernment and a conclusion follows.

II. The Challenges of The Digital Age

The proper starting point is not alarm but discernment, that is, the Ignatian capacity to read the movements of a cultural moment in the light of faith. Grounded in the method of Gaudium et Spes, which calls the Church to read the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel,¹² this analysis names the challenges with honesty, knowing that recognition is already the beginning of wisdom.

II.1 Mission and Evangelisation: The Technician Temptation

The digital environment is simultaneously the most accessible public square in history and the most saturated. John Paul II’s vision of the ‘new Areopagus’ of communications as a genuine mission frontier¹³ has been vindicated by the sheer scale of human presence online: more than five billion people now inhabit digital spaces where they search for love, meaning, community, and truth. Yet the very abundance of the digital world constitutes its first danger for the mission.

The economy of attention is fiercely competitive, and the metrics of digital culture (clicks, likes, shares) reward spectacle over substance. The risk is what might be called ‘evangelisation by hashtag’: a reduction of the kerygma to slogans that move emotions without transforming lives. Pope Francis warned in 2013 that there is a temptation for the Church to become merely technically present, to produce content rather than to witness, so that ‘technicians supplant evangelisers,’ failing to convey the face of Christ or to build a Church that functions as home.¹⁴ Authentic proclamation requires encounter, and encounter requires a depth of communication that digital media can facilitate but also easily subverts.

Algorithmic logic compounds this. Platforms are designed not to facilitate genuine encounter but to maximise engagement, which typically means amplifying what already provokes strong emotional responses – conflict, fear, outrage. The resulting ‘echo chambers’ directly undermine the Church’s prophetic mandate to reach beyond existing constituencies and to model charitable disagreement. For congregations working across cultural, linguistic, and political divides, this structural feature of digital platforms poses a particularly serious challenge.

The digital divide introduces a further dimension of justice. A mission that digitises without attending to who is excluded risks reproducing, in technological form, the colonial patterns it ostensibly opposes. CELAM’s 2025 pastoral document on artificial intelligence addresses precisely this dynamic in the Latin American context, noting that algorithmic systems developed in the Global North often arrive in the South with embedded biases that are invisible to their designers but deeply felt by those they affect.¹⁵

II.2 Community and Fraternal Life: Connection Without Communion

The sociologist Sherry Turkle, in her landmark study Alone Together, documented the paradox at the heart of the digital age: unprecedented connectivity accompanied by an epidemic of loneliness.¹⁶ For religious communities, this paradox takes a specific and vocational form. Pope Francis, in his 2013 Plenary address, stressed that virtual connections must never substitute for relationships requiring ‘presence, prolonged and patient listening, and deep sharing.’ Digital communication can support these relationships, but it cannot replace them.¹⁷

The theological weight of this observation is considerable. The vowed life is essentially communal: it is a sign of the coming Kingdom, lived in fraternal charity.¹⁸ When smartphones interrupt common meals, personal devices replace shared recreation, and community members are present at the same table while inhabiting separate digital worlds, the prophetic sign that religious community is called to be is quietly eroded. The witness of fraternal life – its visibility, its joy, its willingness to endure the friction of real togetherness – is one of the most powerful evangelising realities available to the Church. Digital life, without communal governance, can corrode it from within.

Pope Francis has consistently identified loneliness as one of the defining pathologies of contemporary culture.¹⁹ The digital age, far from addressing this crisis, often deepens it by offering the simulacrum of connection in place of its substance. For novice masters and formators in particular, this reality demands attention: young candidates for religious life frequently arrive with years of digitally mediated relationships as their primary social formation, and the habits of intimacy appropriate to community life must often be learned from scratch.

II.3 Spirituality and Prayer: The Assault on Interiority and the Gnostic Temptation

The contemplative tradition insists that encounter with God requires what the Desert Fathers called hesychia, a stillness of spirit that disposes the soul to receive what cannot be grasped. The digital age is structurally inimical to hesychia. Social media platforms are engineered to capture and hold attention through dopaminergic reward loops; the smartphone has become a machine of distraction whose pull is experienced even in the most sacred spaces. Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, named this with theological precision: digital culture challenges the ‘symbolic language that talks about transcendence’, threatening to reduce reality to what can be represented, quantified, and shared – and thereby impoverishing liturgy, prayer, and the soul’s capacity for silence.²⁰ The constant mediation of experience through screens carries the risk of what Benedict called the ‘spirit made prisoner of matter’: a life so saturated with digital input that the interior spaces necessary for genuine prayer become inaccessible.

Alongside this general challenge, there is a specifically theological danger: what might be called the ‘Gnostic temptation’ of digital spirituality. The digital world tempts the believer toward a disembodied faith, rich in spiritual content, aesthetically satisfying, morally engaged, yet fundamentally detached from the incarnate, sacramental, and communal realities that constitute the Christian mystery. Pope Francis’s insistence that the Church must carry ‘the smell of the sheep’ applies with full force here: a missionary spirituality that retreats into curated digital beauty, however genuinely pious, has lost contact with the flesh and blood it is called to serve.

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, provides empirical grounding for these theological concerns: internet use measurably diminishes the capacity for sustained attention and deep reading, the very cognitive and affective capacities upon which Lectio Divina, contemplative prayer, and serious theological study depend. Thomas Merton identified the fundamental spiritual stakes: ‘Silence is not an absence of speech. It is the presence of God.’²² What is most at risk in the digital age is precisely this silence.

II.4 Formation: The Rival Formation System

Digital culture does not merely distract from formation: it is itself a formation system. Social media platforms shape desires, model identities, reward certain behaviours, and penalise others. They operate, in the philosopher Charles Taylor’s sense, as ‘strong evaluative frameworks’ - environments that tell their inhabitants, continuously and at a level below conscious deliberation, what is worth wanting, what is worth being, and what is worth sharing. Pope Benedict XVI, in his Plenary address, observed that the digital age influences the ‘way of thinking and living’, posing fundamental anthropological questions about communion, authority, and collective understanding.²³ It requires, he insisted, ‘thorough and adequate formation’ to avoid ‘despondency or loss of identity’ among those whose primary formation has taken place in digital environments. Pope Francis’s Christus Vivit identifies the risk for young people specifically: virtual relationships risk substituting for real encounters, producing a generation capable of digital intimacy but struggling with the sustained, vulnerable, and accountable presence that consecrated life demands.²⁴

For those responsible for initial and ongoing formation, this analysis has concrete implications. The digitally formed self is often, in sociological terms, a ‘performing self’: one accustomed to constructing and curating a public identity, to seeking validation through external response, and to withdrawing from environments that offer insufficient affirmation. These habits are directly at odds with the self-gift that profession requires, with the obedience that community life demands, and with the poverty of spirit that contemplation presupposes.

II.5 Ethics: New Moral Frontiers

The digital age has generated a cluster of urgent ethical questions that the Church must address prophetically. Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of ‘surveillance capitalism’, which is the economic logic by which platforms extract, analyse, and monetise the most intimate data of human behaviour, exposes a systematic assault on human dignity that takes place largely outside public awareness.²⁵ Every prayer app, every faith-sharing platform, and every digital pastoral tool operates within economic and technological structures whose values may be deeply inimical to the Gospel.

Artificial intelligence introduces a further range of moral questions. The Pontifical Academy for Life’s Rome Call on AI Ethics addresses the risks of algorithmic decision-making for human dignity, emphasising that no technological system can substitute for the personal moral responsibility that is constitutive of authentic human agency.

We must think about making not only the decision-making criteria of AI-based algorithmic agents understandable, but also their purpose and objectives. These devices must be able to offer individuals information on the logic behind the algorithms used to make decisions. This will increase transparency, traceability and responsibility, making the computer-aided decision-making process more valid. ²⁶

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ provides the broader framework: the ‘technocratic paradigm’, in other words, the tendency to treat technological capacity as its own justification, is a spiritual pathology before it is an economic or political one.²⁷

The ethical dimension also includes the question of digital misinformation and the crisis of truth. The Church has a centuries-old tradition of reasoned inquiry, careful discernment, and commitment to truth. In a digital environment where misinformation spreads exponentially and where algorithmic amplification rewards emotional provocation over factual accuracy, this tradition is both a countercultural resource and a standing obligation.

III. The Opportunities of The Digital Age

The Christian tradition is fundamentally hopeful. After naming the wounds, theological reflection moves with energy and conviction to the opportunities and roots them in the deepest convictions of the faith. The God who became flesh in a specific cultural moment is the God who enters the digital age with equal generality.

III.1 Mission and Evangelisation: The New Areopagus

Saint Paul’s encounter with the Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus (Acts 17:16–34) stands as the paradigmatic scriptural image for mission in a new cultural environment: entering the public square where people gather, engaging the questions they are already asking, and offering the unexpected answer of the Gospel. Pope John Paul II identified the ‘new Areopagus’ of media and communications as precisely this kind of mission field.²⁸ The digital age has realised this vision on a scale no one in 1990 could have imagined.

Pope Francis articulated the missionary logic with pastoral warmth in his 2013 Plenary address: the digital missionary is called to walk ‘like Jesus on the Emmaus Road’, warming hearts through accompaniment and listening, moving at the pace of those who are searching rather than broadcasting from above.²⁹ The image is perfectly calibrated: not technological mastery but pastoral presence; not the efficiency of mass communication but the intimacy of encounter.

The Pontifical Council for Social Communications’ Communio et Progressio offered the foundational vision: the Church’s engagement with social communications serves the unity and progress of the human family.³⁰ Fifty years later, this vision can be realised at a genuinely global scale. Religious congregations can now maintain living contact with diaspora communities, reach isolated individuals who have no access to a physical ecclesial community, and offer catechesis, prayer, and accompaniment to the ‘digital nones’ – those who have left institutional religion, but who continue to search for transcendence in digital spaces.

III.2 Community and Global Solidarity

The same technologies that threaten community, when used with deliberate discernment, can build extraordinary bonds of solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic barriers. The Dicastery for Communication’s Towards Full Presence offers the image of the Good Samaritan as the model for digital presence: attentive, compassionate, willing to stop and be moved by the need of the other, and committed to genuine accompaniment rather than to the performance of attention.³¹

SEDOS itself exemplifies this: a global network of missionary congregations, sharing theological reflection, missiological resources, and pastoral experience across five continents - doing so ever more effectively through digital means. Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti envisions universal fraternity grounded in genuine encounter with the other³²: digital tools, used in the spirit of the Good Samaritan, can extend this encounter to those who would otherwise remain unreachable.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered an unwanted but revealing test case. While it demonstrated conclusively that digital community cannot replace physical presence, it also showed that digital tools could sustain forms of prayer, pastoral accompaniment, and fraternal connection that would otherwise have been entirely impossible. The lesson is not that digital community is equivalent to embodied community, but that it can be a genuine supplement to it and, in circumstances of isolation or emergency, a lifeline.

III.3 Spirituality: Cybertheology and the Spiritual Hunger of the Digital Age

One of the most striking paradoxes of the digital age is that a culture structurally inimical to contemplation has generated an explosive hunger for it. The growth of mindfulness apps, online retreat programmes, digital prayer communities, and spiritual direction by video reflects a profound spiritual need that digital culture itself creates but cannot satisfy. This hunger is itself a missionary opening.

Antonio Spadaro SJ, in his seminal work Cyberteologia, introduced the concept of ‘cybertheology’: the task of thinking Christian faith (liturgy, grace, revelation, sacraments) in creative conversation with the categories of the digital world.³³ Digital symbols and metaphors can illuminate the Kingdom of God, adapting Jesus’s parables (nets, seeds, flocks) to contemporary experience. Pope Benedict XVI himself explored this territory, noting that theology must engage ‘digital thought’ in order to enhance rather than diminish our understanding of faith.³⁴

The mystics are going viral. Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Julian of Norwich, and Ignatius of Loyola find unexpected audiences in digital spaces where people search for depth, silence, and the experience of God. Religious communities and individuals are discovering that digital tools, if used wisely and with discernment, can support and extend the spiritual life: apps facilitating the Liturgy of the Hours, online directed retreats, platforms for Lectio Divina communities, and podcasts introducing the contemplative heritage to new audiences.

III.4 Formation: Democratising Education

Daniella Zsupan-Jerome, in Connected Toward Communion, demonstrates how digital tools, when grounded in ecclesial intentionality, can serve the formation of disciples and the building of genuine community rather than undermining it.³⁵ Distance learning and digital formation resources have expanded dramatically, enabling missionary congregations to offer formation to members in remote or resource-poor environments. This is of particular significance for the Global South, where formal theological education has historically been inaccessible to many.

Yet the opportunity of the digital age for formation reaches deeper than access to content. Pope Francis’ Christus Vivit identifies the digital world as a space where young consecrated persons are already constructing their identity, forming relationships, and searching for meaning; wise formators can meet them there, accompanying the process of integration rather than ignoring it. Digital tools can also support ongoing formation across the entire arc of religious life: online directed retreats, digitally facilitated spiritual direction between a formande and a geographically distant director, virtual gatherings that maintain congregational unity across continents, and podcasts and video lectures that bring the great living theologians into formation houses that could never afford to host them.

Pope Leo XIV, in his 2025 address to the Union of Superiors General, explicitly acknowledged these possibilities, calling it "shortsighted to ignore the extraordinary opportunities" that digital technology offers to communion and mission. The condition, however, is always intentionality: formation in and through digital means requires the same discernment, the same relational attentiveness, and the same rooting in prayer and community that characterise all authentic formation in consecrated life. The digital tool serves the person; it never replaces the formator, the community, or the encounter with the living God that is the heart of all formation.

III.5 Ethics and Prophetic Witness: Algorethics and the Common Good

The Church possesses, in its social teaching, its tradition of moral theology, and its centuries-long reflection on human dignity and the common good, precisely the resources needed to engage the ethical questions of the digital age prophetically. Paolo Benanti OFM, advisor to the Pontifical Academy for Life, has developed the concept of ‘algorethics’: the ethical analysis of the values embedded in algorithmic systems, ensuring that they serve human dignity rather than commercial or political interests.

The Dicastery for Communication’s Towards Full Presence calls believers to co-create digital spaces as environments of encounter and solidarity, not merely to consume existing digital culture but to transform it from within by the presence of Gospel values.³⁶ This is itself a form of mission: modelling a different digital culture, one characterised by truth-telling, hospitality to the stranger, depth of attention, and care for the marginalised.

Digital platforms give religious and missionary voices access to a global public square from which they can speak prophetically on justice, peace, ecological integrity, and human dignity. The rapid spread of Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti through digital channels demonstrates that the Church’s moral teaching can reach audiences far beyond traditional Catholic constituencies when it is communicated with clarity and pastoral warmth.

IV. Principles for Discernment

Discernment, the distinctively Christian practice of reading experience in the light of faith, under the guidance of the Spirit, is the proper Christian response to the digital age. The following five principles are offered not as rules but as theological orientations for communities, congregations, and individuals seeking to inhabit the digital world faithfully.

IV.1 Incarnation: Enter the Flesh of the Digital World

The Incarnation is the model for all Christian cultural engagement. God did not communicate with humanity from a safe distance but entered fully into the conditions of human existence, including its cultural, linguistic, and social particularity. The Church’s missionary tradition has understood this: genuine mission requires genuine presence, not the management of presence from a distance.

For digital mission, this means entering the environments where people actually live, not creating sanitised Catholic spaces that speak only to the already converted, but engaging the public square of the internet with its messiness, its conflict, its searching, and its genuine beauty. It means, as Pope Francis consistently insists, going to the peripheries, including the digital peripheries where the most isolated, the most wounded, and the most spiritually hungry are to be found.³⁷

IV.2 Contemplation before Communication

The apostolic and monastic traditions converge here: the one who communicates must first have something to communicate, and that something flows only from encounter with the living God in prayer and silence. Henri Nouwen identified solitude, silence, and prayer as the ‘three movements’ that ground all genuine ministry³⁸; Thomas Merton grounded the same insight in the Cistercian contemplative tradition.³⁹ In a culture of distraction, this insistence is countercultural, and precisely for that reason, prophetic.

Cal Newport’s concept of ‘digital minimalism’, which refers to intentional, deliberate, and selective use of digital technology, governed by explicit values rather than by technological defaults⁴⁰, represents a secular convergence with the ancient wisdom of the monastic tradition. Communities that establish norms of shared digital simplicity – phone-free prayer and common meals, regular digital sabbath, and communal discernment about platform use – are not merely managing a problem but embodying a witness.

IV.3 Community Accountability and Shared Norms

Religious life is, by its nature, a form of life governed by communal discernment rather than individual preference. The question of digital use is not, therefore, primarily a matter of personal virtue but of community wisdom. Chapter discussions on digital life, treating it as a question of charism, mission, and fraternal witness rather than merely as a matter of regulation, are an expression of the ongoing discernment that is constitutive of religious life. The three evangelical counsels speak directly to digital life. Poverty invites digital simplicity: resisting the accumulation of platforms, data, and digital possessions that serve no genuine mission purpose. Chastity calls for purity of relationship in digital spaces: genuine encounter, respect for the dignity of others, and refusal of the commodification of persons. Obedience invites accountability: willingness to submit personal digital habits to the scrutiny of the community and to the guidance of the Magisterium.

IV.4 Preferential Option for the Digitally Marginalised

The Church’s preferential option for the poor demand’s attention to the digital divide as a justice issue. A mission that digitises without attending to who is excluded risks inadvertently deepening existing inequalities. CELAM’s 2025 document on AI presses this point with particular force: technologies developed in contexts of abundance often arrive in contexts of poverty with hidden costs and structural biases that demand prophetic challenge.⁴¹

The digital mission of a congregation must therefore include both digital presence and digital solidarity: active advocacy for the broadening of meaningful digital access, attention to the most vulnerable users of digital platforms, and resistance to the tendency to measure the success of digital mission by metrics that reflect only the reach within already-connected populations.

IV.5 Authenticity over Performance: Witnesses, Not Influencers

The most penetrating challenge the digital age poses to religious life is not technological but anthropological: the culture of digital performance, in which the self is continuously curated and presented for external validation, is directly at odds with the inner freedom, self-gift, and willingness to be unseen that consecrated life requires. Pope Francis’s distinction between witness and performance, between the missionary who goes out and the one who merely appears to go out, has its most contemporary application in digital life.⁴²

The greatest contribution religious communities can make to digital culture may be precisely this: modelling a different way of being – one characterised by depth rather than breadth, by genuine encounter rather than managed impression, and by the willingness to be present without performance. In a culture saturated with digital noise, the prophetic witness of silence, attention, and unhurried presence carries an extraordinary evangelising force.

V. Duc in Altum: Put Out into The Deep

The Church has navigated many civilisational transformations: the fall of Rome, the Carolingian renaissance, the invention of the printing press, and the encounter with modernity. In each case, the Gospel proved its capacity to enter a new cultural moment not by avoiding it but by transforming it from within. The digital age is the latest and perhaps the vastest of these frontier moments. The digital continent is real, it is vast, and it is inhabited by billions of human beings who search, often without knowing it, for the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.

Pope John Paul II’s summons at the dawn of the new millennium – “Duc in altum, put out into the deep”⁴³ – applies with full force to the digital sea. The missionary Church does not wait on the shore, analysing the water. It puts out, with the Emmaus companion’s attentiveness, the Good Samaritan’s compassion, the Desert Father’s stillness, and the Apostle’s courage, into the deep.

This means, concretely, engaging digital culture with the full resources of the Church’s tradition: its theology, its spirituality, its social teaching, its mystics, and above all its living witness of consecrated persons who have staked their lives on the conviction that God is real, that love is possible, and that mission is worth everything. It means bringing to the digital world not merely content but presence; not merely information but encounter; not merely programmes but persons formed by prayer, shaped by community, and sent by the Spirit.

The digital age is not the enemy of the Gospel. It is its newest field. And as the whole tradition of missionary religious life attests: the harvest is great, the labourers are needed, and the Lord of the harvest goes ahead of those he sends.

1. Cf. J. Bardeen – W.H. Brattain – W. Shockley, «The Transistor, a Semi-Conductor Triode», in Physical Review 74 (1948) 230–231.

2. Cf. F. Faggin – M.E. Hoff – S. Mazor – M. Shima, The History of the Intel 4004, Intel Corporation, Santa Clara 2006.

3. STATISTA RESEARCH DEPARTMENT, Number of smartphone users worldwide 2013–2028, Statista, Hamburg 2024, accessed on 1 March 2026: <statista.com/statistics/330695>.

4. Cf. M. CASTELLS, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols., Blackwell, Oxford 1996–1998, vol. I, p. 21.

5. Cf. E. BRYNJOLFSSON – A. MCAFEE, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton, New York 2014, pp. 7–11.

6. Cf. UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME, Human Development Report 2020: The Next Frontier, UNDP, New York 2020, pp. 112–118.

7. Cf. WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, The Future of Jobs Report 2020, WEF, Geneva 2020, p. 5.

8. Cf. DICASTERY FOR COMMUNICATION, Towards full presence. Pastoral reflection on engagement with social media, 2023, n. 2.

9. FRANCIS, Address of Holy Father Francis to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (21 September 2013).

10. BENEDICT XVI, Message for the 43rd World Communications Day (24 May 2009).

11. LEO XIV, Address to participants at the meeting promoted by the Union of Superiors General (USG) (26 Novembre 2025).

12. SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, Gaudium et Spes, 4.

13. Cf. JOHN PAUL II, Redemptoris Missio, n. 37c.

14. Cf FRANCIS, Address to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (2013), 3.

15. Cf. CELAM, La Inteligencia Artificial: Una Mirada Pastoral desde América Latina y el Caribe, CELAM, Bogotá 2025, 4.1.

16. Cf. S. TURKLE, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, New York 2011, pp. 1–16.

17. Cf. FRANCIS, Address to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 2.

18. Cf. JOHN PAUL II, Vita Consecrata, 41–42.

19. Cf. FRANCIS, Message for the 53rd World Communications Day (24 May 2019).

20. Cf. Benedict XVI, Address to the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (2011).

21. Cf. N. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W.W. Norton, New York 2010, pp. 115–143.

22. T. Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1958, p. 46.

23. Cf. BENEDICT XVI, Address to the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (2011).

24. FRANCIS, Christus Vivit, 88.

25. Cf. S. ZUBOFF, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs, New York 2019, pp. 8–15.

26. PONTIFICAL ACADEMY FOR LIFE, Rome Call on AI Ethics (2020).

27. Cf. FRANCIS, Laudato Si’, 102–114.

28. Cf. JOHN PAUL II, Redemptoris Missio, n. 37c.

29. Cf. FRANCIS, Address to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, 2.

30. PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS, Communio et Progressio (23 May 1971), 1.

31. Cf. DICASTERY FOR COMMUNICATION, Towards Full Presence, 7.

32. Cf. FRANCIS, Fratelli Tutti, 43–44.

33. Cf. A. SPADARO, Cyberteologia. Pensare il Cristianesimo al tempo di Internet, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2012, p. 18.

34. Cf. BENEDICT XVI, Address to the participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications (2011).

35. D. ZSUPAN-JEROME, Connected Toward Communion: The Church and Social Communication in the Digital Age, Liturgical Press, Collegeville (MN) 2014, pp. 32–38.

36. Cf. DICASTERY FOR COMMUNICATION, Towards Full Presence, 4.

37. Cf. FRANCIS, Evangelii Gaudium, 264.

38. Cf. H.J.M. NOUWEN, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry, Seabury Press, New York 1981, pp. 25–44.

39. Cf. T. MERTON, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1958.

40. Cf. C.S. NEWPORT, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Portfolio/Penguin, New York 2019, pp. 30–55.

41. Cf. CELAM, La Inteligencia Artificial: Una Mirada Pastoral desde América Latina y el Caribe, CELAM, Bogotá 2025.

42. Cf. FRANCIS, Message for the 57th World Communications Day, (21 May 2023).

43. JOHN PAUL II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, 38.