This Sunday, 17 May, we celebrate the 60th World Day of Social Communications, a date the Church dedicates each year to reflecting on how we communicate, what we transmit, and above all, from where we do so.
Pope Leo XIV has chosen as this year's theme a profound and urgent invitation: “Guarding Human Voices and Faces”. In his message, the Holy Father notes that the face and voice are sacred because they reflect the image of God in every person. They are not data, not profiles, not content: they are the place where God becomes visible in the other. And today, in a world where artificial intelligence can simulate voices, fabricate faces, and generate soulless words, guarding that humanity in communication becomes a deeply spiritual act.
You can read the full message of Pope Leo XIV here.
When we read the Pope’s message, we cannot help but recognize in it the echo of something our foundress, Saint Marie Eugenie of Jesus, understood clearly more than one hundred and fifty years ago.
For her, communication was never merely an exchange of information. It was, above all, a form of witness. She held that one could be an apostle “even by a gesture, by a fold of the veil”: that the presence of God in the soul manifests itself in one’s bearing, in one’s gaze, in the way one listens. What the Pope today calls “guarding the human face,” Marie Eugenie called living from the inside out.
She also warned of the danger of empty words, of “useless chatter” that, rather than building up, scatters and “drives away the Holy Spirit.” In her time, algorithms did not exist, but the temptation did: to fill silence with noise, to voice opinions without reflection, to communicate without first listening. Pope Leo XIV speaks today of platforms that “reward quick emotions and penalize reflection”—is that not exactly what Marie Eugenie sought to avoid in every conversation?
And above all, our foundress understood something the digital world has brought back to the fore: that to hear the Word that speaks within, one must close the windows to the noise outside. “God is silence,” she said. “To hear his voice, it is necessary to silence the inner noise of our own passions and agitations.” Guarding our inner voice—the one God has given us—requires that courageous silence to which we seldom dare.
The Pope invites us not to “silence our voice” or “hide our face” by yielding our mental and creative faculties to machines. For us, from the Assumptionist perspective, this has a concrete dimension: every time we communicate with authenticity, charity, truth, and a present soul, we are doing apostolic work.
Great resources and grand words are not required. Marie Eugenie valued “sweet and firm” words, absolute frankness, and generous listening. She valued a teacher who taught her students to express themselves “with simplicity and fluency,” because that capacity to communicate well is a bridge of relationship between people. Communicating well—with one’s own face, with one’s own voice, from one’s own experience of faith—is, in the spirit of the Assumption, a form of charity.
On this day, the Church invites us to ask ourselves: from where do we communicate? From haste or from presence? From noise or from inner silence? From the constructed image or from the real face?
Saint Marie Eugenie reminds us that the most powerful communication is born from a worked-upon interiority, from a soul that has first listened before speaking. Pope Leo XIV reminds us that that interiority—that face and voice God has given us—deserves to be guarded against all that threatens to make it disappear.
May this Sunday be an opportunity to communicate with more soul, more presence, and more love.
“One can preach even by a gesture, by a fold of the veil.” — Saint Marie Eugenie of Jesus
Almudena de la Torre
Communication Team