Pope Leo XIV to address World Communications Day 2027

Pope Leo XIV has identified the modern digital landscape as a spiritual crisis in his theme for the 2027 World Communications Day. According to Daniel Esparza of Aleteia, the Pope's message focuses on the concept of attention, which derives from the Latin term ad-tendere, meaning to stretch toward.

The Pope suggests that true attention requires reaching deliberately toward something outside oneself rather than consuming or scrolling through content. Esparza reports that current communication platforms operate on the opposite principle by stretching toward users. These platforms use psychological triggers like anxiety, outrage, and craving to harvest attention as a raw material for advertisers.