Vatican prefect exhorts journalists to serve the truth
July 18, 2011
Speaking at the Catholic University of Ávila, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera urged journalists to devote themselves to the truth.
“It is not easy to serve man every day through words, because words by their nature indicate the truth of things, and are sacred,” said the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. “The sacred demands love and respect and excludes manipulation. He who would show the truth must allow himself to be guided by it, but he must also change his own life … He is a notary of the truth, but not a distorted truth; reality in all its truth, not partial or at the service of special interests that are not those of the good of man, of the person and of society, in its truth.”
“There is absence and lack of freedom, despite appearances to the contrary,” he added. “All of this because truth is offended, because it is subjugated and made to serve our own ends instead of us serving it, because reality is manipulated, because it is placed at the service of special interests and powers.”
“If complete and total objectivity is difficult, the effort to discover the truth is not,” he added, quoting Blessed John Paul. “Nor is the decision to offer the truth, the habit of not manipulating the truth, the attitude of the incorruptibility of the truth.”
“All professionals of communication, and especially those who profess the Christian faith, in Jesus Christ, the witness to the truth who has come to illuminate all men, will find a light and a guide for their actions and their service,” the cardinal concluded. “He is the Word that reveals the mystery of God and reveals to man his own mystery; in him we encounter the truth of God which is inseparably united to the truth of man.”
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