VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Shortly after the election of Pope Leo XIV, several news outlets reported on his speech at the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization and his criticism of television's positive portrayal of "anti-Christian" lifestyles.
Catholic News Service had reported on his synod speech and spoke to him the day after the synod ended. But CNS also asked him in 2023, when he became a cardinal, if his perspective had changed, particularly given Pope Francis' outreach and welcome to LGBTQ Catholics.
He had told the synod that portrayals of the modern family on television and in films present a huge challenge to the Catholic Church. "Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema," he told synod members.
"The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective," he had said.
In September 2023, when CNS asked the new Cardinal Prevost about his earlier remarks, he said, "I would say there's been a development in the sense of the need for the church to open and to be welcoming."
"On that level, I think Pope Francis has made it very clear that he doesn't want people to be excluded simply on the basis of choices that they make, whether it be lifestyle, work, the way they dress or whatever," he said.
"Doctrine has not changed," the cardinal said. "But we are looking to be more welcoming and more open and to say all people are welcome in the church."
In the 2012 interview, Father Prevost said he did not believe encouraging Catholics to turn away from mass media and social networks was the answer to lessening media influence on the growing acceptance of "anti-Christian lifestyle choices."
The solution is to "teach people to become critical thinkers," he said. They need to read or hear something and "be able to discern, if you will, to understand that underlying the message that's being communicated is a very different message, or a very subtle message that has severe consequences for the future of society."
St. Augustine and the other early church theologians were successful preachers in part because they understood how to communicate to the people of their day, and the Catholic Church must do the same today, he said.
But the key is not slick church media, Father Prevost said, but inviting people "into an experience where they can rediscover what it means to have faith, what it means to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, what it means to recognize that God is indeed a part of our lives."
"St Augustine would say that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. But the reality in society today is that people have become alienated from the God who does dwell within us," he said, "so to help people rediscover the presence of God, to rediscover the meaning of a relationship with Jesus Christ, is a big challenge, but I think that's what the starting point is."
After the Second Vatican Council, and particularly with the pontificate of Benedict XVI, he said, Catholics started to rediscover the relevance of the early church theologians, including St. Augustine.
In the early centuries of Christianity, like today, people tended to look at "what we call the secular world for all the answers" but discovered "that all the answers are not there, and that people are really looking for something else, and that the searching for meaning in life, ultimately, the searching for explanations, for answers, for understanding life and death, for understanding who we are as human beings and what our life is all about, that the fathers (of the church) do indeed have a great deal to say to us."
The "Confessions" of St. Augustine "continues to be one of the widest read books in the history of the world," he said, and that is "precisely because of Augustine's insight into human experience."
"He does a magnificent job of communicating both his own experience and what he lived and how that experience can indeed be a window, if you will, an opening to discovering a personal experience of God in human life," Father Prevost said. "Human experience, he says, is precisely where you can find God."
But St. Augustine also insisted that finding God "leads you into solidarity with other people," which, Father Prevost said, "is perhaps a piece of the experience that is missing nowadays."
"So often today, in the highly individualistic society that people are growing up in, people think that 'my' experience is the criteria -- Am I happy or am I not happy?" he said. But "Augustine's experience says that, well, that isn't enough, and maybe what you're calling happiness isn't authentic happiness, because you're going to lose that too."
For St. Augustine, he said, "an authentic experience of happiness has to include other people, and has to include being concerned about other people, and those are elements that express, I think, a very important part of the Gospel message. ... If you love God, then you also need to be showing that by loving your neighbor, and the two go hand in hand."
