Between November and December, I visited South Korea. In Seoul, a metropolis of ten million inhabitants, ancient Buddhist temples coexist with ultra-modern skyscrapers. Elderly people in traditional hanbok walk next to young people immersed in their smartphones. Traditional spaces such as markets and old houses seem to be able to coexist with ultra-modern architecture, robots that make deliveries and state-of-the-art shopping malls. I have seen one of the most technologically advanced companies in the world preserve a thousand-year-old culture, without blocking innovation.
This tension questioned me. How do we experience the technological change taking place? Are we aware of this? Is our use of digital tools critical or passive? Moreover, above all: do we try to understand and inhabit them from within our faith and vocation, or do we use and/or suffer them as something foreign?
Pope Leo XIV, meeting with the Superiors General last November, recalled the urgency of "integrating nova et vetera with balance". Technology offers immense possibilities for communion and mission, but it risks replacing virtual connection with real relationships, where physical presence, patient listening, and deep sharing are needed.
The Spanish thinker Joan Subirats, in his recent contribution on democracy in the digital age, warns that we are experiencing an erosion of ties caused by accelerated digitisation. The distances between those who have access and skills and those who are excluded are growing; Important decisions are left to a few experts or algorithms, and everyone ends up locked in their own bubbles and interests. Without critical integration between technology and human participation, social fragmentation deepens.
This is also true for us. Our fraternal meetings often take place online: do we sometimes replace the relationship with a hasty video call? Does personal prayer perhaps give way to the compulsive scrolling of screens, even through Apps that help us with different prayer texts? How many moments of online proclamation and reflection do we propose, also thanks to the creation of digital content for the mission? Do we also stay on the roads where people live?
In Korea, I saw that tradition and innovation can coexist when there is a solid identity capable of conscious choices. This harmony is not always easy. Don't we often feel almost passive consumers of virtual relationships that do not feed the heart?
The challenge is not to reject the digital world but to learn to live it as believers, respecting the dignity of the person. It means asking ourselves, does this reality serve communion or isolation? Does it nourish prayer, or does it risk exhausting the interiority? Does it help the mission or replace it with efficient but sterile surrogates?
As Franciscans, we are called to live inter gentes, amongst the people, with an incarnate presence. St Francis did not evangelise by correspondence but by walking with his brothers, embracing lepers, and looking into the eyes with mercy. Technology can amplify this presence, but never replace it.
The Jubilee of Hope invites us to return to the essential: the living relationship with God and between brothers and sisters. We guard spaces where screens are silent, and people talk to each other. We choose the fatigue of the real encounter against the ease of virtual connection.
Only in this way do new talents do not remain buried out of fear, but are integrated into the living tradition that we bring, because hope always needs faces, not pixels.