The Vatican’s World Day of Social Communications was last Sunday, May 17. Next Sunday, May 24, is Pentecost. There is a lot to think about there.
The Sunday before Pentecost was purposely chosen by Pope St. Paul VI in 1967 as the date for this observance when “social communication” meant television, radio and print, and the emerging use of satellites, which enabled each person to become “a citizen of the world,” the pope wrote. Effusive in his praise for these new technologies, he called them “a wonderful plan of God’s providence.”
Well, how quaint. Whether we think of communications tech as a gift of God’s providence or not, it is certainly not currently structured to communicate God’s dream for creation. To the contrary.
Today the global communications industry is dominated by five tech companies built to enrich five human beings who run their companies, shall we say, on less-than-transparent, other-than-common-good entrepreneurial goals. They have succeeded in coopting human vulnerability for their own gain by engineering devices to keep our brains awash in micro-hits of dopamine every time we pick them up.
Pope Leo’s message for this 60th observance of the World Day of Social Communications is titled “Preserving Human Voices and Faces.” He asks us to use these technologies and contribute to their further development in ways that will safeguard the humans who use them.
He reminds us that the word for person in Greek it is prosopon, or mask, and in Latin it’s per-sonare – to sound through. Both words imply a mask worn in a drama through which the voice of the actor is amplified to the audience. Something that obscures the face may seem an odd choice for signifying a human person, but wearing a mask to play a character in a drama allows actors to inhabit the character on the stage – using the mask not for deception but for freedom, amplifying and dignifying what is universal in the human experience.
Referring to the growing influence of AI, Pope Leo says “The future of communication must be one where machines serve as tools that connect and facilitate human lives, rather than erode the human voice.” The human face and the human voice, the Holy Father says, are indelible reflections of God’s love. So they are.
At the grocery store recently, I saw ahead of me a woman with one arm around a child balanced on her hip. With the other arm she held a phone to her ear; her face was turned away from the child and from me. As the toddler caught my eye with hers, those two lighthouse lanterns swept us into a moment of pure joy. Surely this encounter fulfilled the divine purpose of a human face.
If this is true, that the deepest level of communication is human relationship, then, Leo says, it is necessary to preserve our human voices and faces for just such encounters and not allow them to be coopted by technologies that can misrepresent us in a public square more vast than anything his predecessor could have imagined.
Honestly, I am ambivalent about tech tools, even though I’ve spent most of my religious life attempting to deploy them in constructive ways. In much the same way that early Christians could not have evangelized without the 56,000 miles of Roman roads built and defended by the very empire that oppressed them, tech tools are nearly impossible to escape.
That is why events such as this annual Catholic observance of a World Day of Social Communication are valuable. They highlight the sacredness and dignity of human personhood, and remind us, as Pope Leo’s letter does, that “safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves.”
I don’t really have any wisdom to share with those who ask me about how to manage these technologies. Only this: in any given moment, does tech serve human relationship or separate from it? Using AI tools to cure a disease? Okay! Manipulating your image or voice to suggest you are someone other than who you are? Not so much.
Perhaps we can look to events in the upper room of Pentecost. If, as Pope Leo has written, we “Cherish the gift of communication as the deepest truth of humanity, to which all technological innovation should also be oriented,” then we see at Pentecost what might happen through such an orientation. In that upper room “tongues as of fire” parted and rested on individual persons, who were uniquely enspirited in order to communicate effectively to a broad swath of humanity – people of every tongue and nation. It is this differentiation of persons and gifts – not uniformity – that makes for unity and communion.
Pope Leo tells us that our unique faces and voices, our thinking and creativity, are what shape our relationships, reality, and sacred humanity.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is the director of communications for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2026.
