We live in an age marked by immediacy, information overload, and hyperconnectivity. The digital age offers immense opportunities, but it also poses profound challenges for Christians today. The internet is not a neutral space: it is a new “continent,” a digital continent, where the Gospel must be incarnated and made present.
As Christians, we are called to discern—a word popularized by the late Pope Francis—all of this. It is not enough to be connected; we must ask ourselves what kind of mark we want to leave on social media and whether our words, reflections, images, and everything we publish contribute to truth and charity, in short, to bearing witness. Socrates already stated that “the unexamined life is not worth living”; that is why we must consistently take the helm of our presence on the internet, discerning at every step what builds us up and what empties us, using technology critically and for the good, for personal growth and, as a sum of all, for the growth of the world.
Christians in the digital age have the mission of humanizing this environment, but they also run the risk of falling into superficiality: from consuming content without digesting it coherently to ending up relating to each other without true communion, but rather “profile to profile.” In the face of this, faith reminds us that behind every screen there is a person, a child of God, worthy of respect and encounter. St. Paul exhorted us: “Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial” (1 Cor 6:12). Today, the message of our patron saint remains as relevant as ever: not everything that circulates on the internet builds up the heart or strengthens the spirit.
On the other hand, the digital age can be a privileged means of evangelization and encounter. Sharing the faith, spreading messages of hope, accompanying those who suffer… All this is possible on social media if it is done with authenticity. As Heidegger reminded us, “technology is not an end in itself, but a way of uncovering reality”; the challenge is that this discovery of what is truly real leads us to the truth of the Gospel and not to empty dispersion.
In short, Christians are called to be witnesses in the digital world as well: to sow light in the midst of screens, to show humanity where anonymity so often reigns, and to make technology an instrument of communion.
