Into Mystery

Evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.  - Pope Leo XIV

“The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that, when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.

It is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The secular media will always be stronger in this field. And while it is vital that the Church be actively engaged in and with the media, we cannot successfully compete with the secular media.

In his City of God, Augustine teaches that mystery focuses the imagination on the darkness surrounding death—specifically, on the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion, which St. Augustine saw echoed in the deaths of the Christian martyrs. Spectacle, on the other hand—with its companion features: celebrity and heroism—offers people a false comfort by distracting the mind from its instinctive fear of death. Augustine saw this false comfort present in Roman theatre, sports events, secular festivals, and military honors.”

-from his statement to the 2012 Synod of Bishops as Cardinal Prevost

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2025/05/12/still-in-process/

caveat-- he may not stand by this previous statement from 13 years ago 

Update on St. Rita Day: Kathryn Jean Lopez commented on Relevant Radio, "Pope Leo XIV isn’t here to be a celebrity. He’s here to be a shepherd. And in a time when the world is overloaded with noise and spectacle, his calm, Christ-centered example may be exactly what the Church needs."