Earlier this February, the sovereigns of social media were summoned to Washington, D.C., for what the wise woman of American mainstream media, Peggy Noonan, described in her column as a ritual denunciation and show of outrage by the U.S. Senate’s judiciary committee.

Mark Zuckerberg, supremo of Facebook/Meta, and his binary clones from X, Tik Tok, Snapchat, etc. feigned humility before the assembled pretenders to political power. Then, manifesting their masters of the universe invincibility, they brushed aside calls for greater regulation of their toxic products, Noonan wrote.  

Obscured by their hubris yet again, she noted, was the “great unanswered domestic question” that has bedeviled us since we — and especially our children — started living lives staring obsessively into our screens. 

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“Exactly when did we as a people decide that a new technology could come along, make itself pervasive by making its products addictive, and feed our children images and information that are actively harmful to them — and this is not only fully legal (but) can’t even be regulated by the government?” Noonan asked.

“Put another way,” she wrote, “when do the American people get to have a say on the culture in which they raise their kids?” 

Fittingly, an answer — if not the answer — to her critical question had come a week earlier in the form of a pastoral letter from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. To be polite, CCCB pastoral letters are infrequently headline news. But the one on Jan. 24, the feast day of the patron saint of journalists, St. Francis de Sales, surely should have been. In it, the episcopal commission on justice and peace, chaired by Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine, offered a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” solution to the conundrum of regaining control over social media’s anti-social consequences.

While the pastoral letter does not explicitly call for increased government regulation (a blessed relief given the Canadian government’s recent ham-handed steam rolling of web-based free speech) neither does it shy away from giving an honest account of the dangers social media poses.

Citing Pope Francis, the letter calls for an unmasking of the “snake tactics” so ubiquitous and yet so easily overlooked in our screen life. Drawing from both Francis and Pope Benedict XVI, it  draws a parallel with the “crafty serpent” in the Book of Genesis who began the tragic history of human sin by spreading the first ever false news. It echoes papal warnings against “naivete” about social media’s pit-like dark side.

“The design of the platforms and the algorithms that dictate their performance can play on the worst of our human tendencies leading to online environments that violate the core Christian values of truth and human dignity,” the pastoral letter says. “Social media can give the illusion of creating bridges between people when it is in fact tearing apart our common life.”

At the same time, the letter is refreshingly positive about the social good that can also come from social media. The illnesses that now seem so intrinsic to so much Internet use are best combatted, the bishops write, by specific internalized safeguards. The answer to them lies less in our search engines than in ourselves. Digital platform controls are well and good, but what matters most is the formation of our consciences before our fingers hit the keyboard. 

If that seems too much like sunny face optimism, Archbishop Lépine noted in an interview with The Catholic Register that the message of the pastoral letter emerged in large measure from the darker stages of the COVID pandemic in the fall of 2021. 

With restrictions on personal contact lifting still very much present in our lives, Lépine said, it became possible to observe and reflect on what happens when a population faces the near-universal experience of having almost no alternative to communicating except through social media. 

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“During the pandemic, everyone was inside their homes or offices, we didn’t have personal interaction, so it was very useful to be able to meet online. It let people reach out and keep a sense of personal connection. The problem is that when you’re online, everything is two dimensional, so people became impatient. They got frustrated, unhappy. We can see from that time the importance of learning to be patient even online,” Lépine said.

The Montreal archbishop, in demeanour and track record, is a model of how patience need not equate to inaction. During the COVID pandemic, when bout upon bout of arbitrary church closures were imposed by the Quebec government, Lépine began holding outdoor Masses, some in -29 windchill. Likewise, after years of medical aid in dying (MAiD) encroaching on Catholic health care, he boldly sued the provincial government this week for its MAiD über alles approach. His lawsuit could spare a Montreal palliative care facility from being compelled to perform medical killing even though it is located in a church building still owned by the Archdiocese.

Very much in keeping with his character, he makes the point that such risk taking requires the kind of humility essential to social media conduct that embodies Catholic faith and ethics. To engage in the essential unreality of online communication, he says, we must bring unwavering awareness of our obligation to be fully human in the Catholic sense, i.e. we must love God and our neighbour just as much onscreen as eye to eye. 

“(The internet) is a tool but human beings are much more than tools. Human beings are ends in themselves. You must not forget who you are by becoming subservient to the tool,” Lépine said.

Remembering who you are, especially amid the dizzying disembodied distractions of web life, begins with keeping in mind that you remain limited and fallible regardless of the Internet’s temptations that induce you to believe that screen life makes you god-like omniscient. 

“You are never in contact with the whole of reality. You cannot know everything. So, you should not behave online as if you do,” the Archbishop says.

Referencing the pastoral letter’s quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas, he emphasizes that truth can be found even in mistakes. In error, there can be a fragment of truth separated from the whole. To accept that, he says, is to align ourselves online with seeking truth in charity. Knowing our own capacity for error means lovingly allowing for it in others. 

“We have to distinguish between the person and what the person is saying. You can disagree but your language has to be clear and respectful. We put our trust in God, but to trust in God means we trust that God loves everyone and is at work in the soul of everyone. I can trust God is working in me because I need His grace, and so I know He will it give it to others as well,” he says.

Grace, Lépine and the pastoral letter underscore, is easily forgotten online simply because of the frantic pace set by web-based activity and stimulation. The effect can — often is — an exhaustion of hope in everything but State-mandated actions intended to moderate the odium of the Internet. It’s as if a still relatively novel, in historic terms, forum for communication is a kind of cancer eradicable only by experimental forms of bureaucratic/technocratic chemotherapy.

But the antidote offered by the pastoral letter is precisely one of hope sustained because, as Lépine points out, the most fundamental of human qualities is the search for truth. If we acknowledge even among our interlocutors such openness to truth (aka conversion), we enrich in ourselves the charity to help them find it. 

“Jesus Christ invites us to look for truth, but truth in love, truth in charity because without love, something is missing from truth. What’s missing is Jesus Christ. We live in a time when young adults in their twenties and thirties are intentionally looking for meaning. As Christians, we need to bring them the truth of Jesus Christ: what it means to be a human being. That is the flambeau, the torch.”

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The internet, Archbishop Lépine says, can be a tool to spread that light if Catholic hearts and minds make use of it.

“The rest,” he says, “belongs to God.”