Mass media, sztuka komercyjna i zagrożenia środowiska naturalnego jako wyzwanie duszpasterskie

Abstract

Many things have changed in the course of recent years in Poland. These years have seen an increase in the interest of pastoral, moral and religious messages in the Church and in literature. We have to name here: 1) the mass media, 2) Christian art, 3) the issues of natural and social ecology. The demands on the lay apostolate and the pastoral needs make us see their position and tasks in the evangelical and humanizational mission of the Church. Their new status is defined not so much by the current needs and threats, resulting from an inappropriate use of the mass media, art and the care about the natural environment in the life of a community. Rather, it is the demands posed on them at the threshold of the Jubilee of the Church, demands that should be satisfied, i.e. they should complement, enrich and make pastoral care effective. Today it is hard to imagine pastoral ministry without taking into account those areas-means, which should be used in the process of the proclamation of the evangelical message. It is also a well-known fact that, left on their own, or used perversely, they may hamper or even destroy the flow of values in the world. Their ubiquitous and everyday character with which they influence man in various aspects of his life, his activity and his environment, suggests that these realities should be treated in pastoral care as a mass general component. In other words, priests must every day take into account their existence and influence. They should be treated as a constant element of the lives of the believers and, at the same time, a component of that mission. That contact, therefore, may be neither occasional or partial. Now, it is difficult to imagine somebody who should wish to distance himself from the mass media as bearers of values. Even their shameful or negative role as a „system of sin” (see Enc. SRS) may not thwart a positive attitude. On the contrary, it is the Church’s task to oppose it with a creative and alternative activity, using those means of evangelization, as formed in the spirit of Christianity, towards all the people who pass on anti-values through them. It is a permanent task of the Church-the People of God to sanctify all sinful deeds and tools and include them in the service of universal and evangelical values. It is likewise with commercial art, or, rather, with its trash, which as an anti-value should be transformed according to the humanistic and religious paramétré. Art and material culture, formed in the Christian spirit, should become a meaningful and, at the same time, efficacious tool of spreading the „civilization of life and love” Moreover, if need be, they should be bearers of the Gospel. The perennial patronage of the Church over culture, art and science should now be again a matter of primary importance within its local dimension. What is more, it should become a method with which to make the world more human, in which the religious man, endowed with the supernatural grace of the omnipotent Creators impresses its visible mark in „the image and likeness of God” In like manner, nature, which has been ecologically destroyed, and social communities, become „challenges” for churches as it has been written already in the first pages of the Bible. They are orders which, for some important reasons, can hardly be taken lightly. We ourselves are part of nature; therefore we can, thanks to our „friendship with nature” shape duly our religious vocation. It is possible on the basis of the incarnation of earthly gifts and respect for the rights of creations. A mature responsibility of mankind for all the gifts from God; they are deposits we may pursue in the journey of generations through the „common earthly garden”, and become a special vocation for the believers. It is their mission and we shall be brought to account before God Himself and be taken responsible for the state we have left nature for the generations to come.