The Vatican recently released two documents that matter not only to The B.C. Catholic but to our fractured world.
Both speak to how we communicate and relate to one another in an age being reshaped by technology. Their timing is not accidental. Both were released as the Church marked the feast of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists and communicators.
In his 2026 World Day of Social Communications message, Pope Leo XIV warned about the “anthropological challenge” of our time: the temptation to trade the “sacredness of the human voice and face” for the “simulated empathy” of artificial intelligence.
At the same time, in a letter to the Catholic media in France, the Pope reminded them that the antidote to a polarized, AI-driven culture can be found in the “reasons of the heart” and the “centrality of good relationships.”
It is at moments like this that we appreciate having St. Francis de Sales as a patron. Just over a century ago, in his 1923 encyclical Rerum Omnium Perturbationem, Pope Pius XI offered Francis de Sales as a model for an age of “confusion, division, and interior unrest.” He described the saint’s life as a program for restoring a disordered world, not through power, ideology, or coercion, but through interior holiness, gentleness, and quiet fidelity.
A century later, that message is just as relevant, perhaps more so. In a culture addicted to outrage rather than persuasion, distraction rather than reflection, and impulse rather than discipline, St. Francis de Sales offers a counter-culture of gentleness, clarity, and a formed interior life. His most famous quote still rings true: “Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.”
Pope Francis echoed that same vision in 2022 in his Apostolic Letter Totum Amoris Est, issued for the 400th anniversary of the saint’s death. He wrote that Francis de Sales recognized that times were changing, and that those changes were not a threat to the Gospel, but an opportunity: “The word of God that he had loved from his youth now opened up before him new and unexpected horizons in a rapidly changing world. That same task awaits us in this, our own age of epochal change.”
Pope Pius XI made a similar point, noting that Francis de Sales showed how holiness is the vocation of every Christian, in every state of life. He warned that “the great need of our day is to curb the unmeasured desires of mankind.”
The wisdom of Francis de Sales speaks as well to the 21st century as it did to the 17th. In his message to the French Catholic media, Pope Leo XIV said Catholic journalists have a responsibility in a polarized world to tell the stories of those who suffer and those who work for peace, to in effect become the “antennae that pick up and retransmit what the weak, the marginalized, those who are alone and need to know the joy of feeling loved are experiencing.”
He called Catholic media to “be sowers of good words, amplifiers of voices that courageously seek reconciliation by disarming hearts of hatred and fanaticism,” calling this a “service of truth” offered not only to believers, but to the wider world.
Which brings us to this Sunday’s Catholic Press Collection, the most “special” of the local special collections because it is the only one that stays with parishes—every penny—to help your pastor provide The B.C. Catholic to parishioners.
In an age when popes are warning about the dismantling of human communication, the erosion of trust, and the replacement of relationships with simulations, supporting your diocesan newspaper is more than an act of charity; it is an act of cultural and spiritual self-preservation.
For more than a century, St. Francis de Sales has been held up by the Church as a patron for a damaged age. We are living in one of those ages, and we who produce this paper, in print and online, are grateful to have his patronage. We would be grateful to have your support as well in this weekend’s collection.
To donate online visit support.rcav.org/parishes/second-collection.
