Highlight the positive message, says Vatican spokesman

Published: 2008-05-29

TORONTO (CNS) -- The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, urged members of the Catholic media to highlight the positive and beautiful in life, while not ducking the responsibility to recognize and denounce evil. "It is always necessary to have a criterion, a hierarchy in expressing the Christian proposition," Father Lombardi told several hundred communications professionals at a plenary session of the international Catholic Media Convention May 29. "That which is positive takes first place." He pointed out it was "no accident" Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical was on love, and his second was on hope, nor that his first book was "on Jesus who shows us the face of God." "Benedict XVI insists that ours is not a religion of prohibitions, of 'nos,'" he said. Pope Benedict, however, has been realistic and uncompromising in his critiques of relativism, subjectivism, individualism, materialism and hedonism, he said. "We have to know how to recognize and denounce the evils, the risks and the dead ends present in contemporary culture," he said.

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