Always spread the Good News

With all the pieces of news that are bombarded on us 24/7, we should never forget that there is the Good News that can and should serve as the constant context of all news items that come our way.

This Good News will never fade. It will never become stale and obsolete. It will always be breaking and ever relevant to every event in our life, big or small, happy or sad. That is, if we also know how to present it and understand it.

What is this Good News? It’s nothing other than “the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the ‘Son of the living God,’ who died and rose from the dead.” (Compendium 19) Being the pattern of our humanity and the savior of our damaged humanity, he is the one who can tell us how to understand all the events of our life.

He gives us the whole picture of things. He gives meaning, reason and direction to everything that happens in our life. Nothing in our life is not covered by his redemptive work. Precisely as our redeemer, Christ takes up all of our human affairs and concerns and gives them their proper and redemptive meaning.

St. Irenaeus explained this point very well when he said: “When Christ became incarnate and was made man, he recapitulated in himself the long history of mankind and procured for us a ‘short cut’ to salvation, so that what we had lost in Adam, that is, being in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. For this reason Christ experienced all the stages of life, thereby giving communion with God to all men.”

The obvious conclusion we can make is that we really have to know Christ very well to be able to understand everything in our life and live them according to his redemptive plan.

We can never over-emphasize this point, and everything therefore has to be done so that we get to know Christ as he ought to be known, that is, without distortion of any kind. We may never know him completely and fully since he is a mystery, but there’s such thing as existential faith in him, expressed in hope and charity that would put us in living contact with him.

We have to understand this existential faith as not opposed to submitting ourselves to the teaching authority of the Church. In fact, it needs this submission. It also involves having recourse to the sacraments, continually studying the doctrine of our faith, waging constant ascetical struggle to develop virtues and fight against our weaknesses, temptations and sin, etc.

Another way of nourishing this existential faith is by showing it with our deeds, precisely by making an effort to show how Christ is relevant to every event in our life. The media should be open to Christ and should strive their best, making the necessary study and research, to relate everything in their work to Christ.

That way, we can be more assured that the news items are purified of spins, biases, prejudices and the tricks of sensationalism, etc. We can be more assured that the news are properly anchored and oriented. Otherwise, they become fake news.