The little girl in South America with her legs cut off by a train on its way through Mexico, in front of her mother.
Another 8-year-old girl in the Philippines locked in the dark in a room with her aunt selling her little body online. The woman, or rather, the many women impregnated by their tormentors in Uganda, rejected by their families and trained to make weapons. The refugees, the homeless, the teenage victims of violence, the poor families, the malnourished children without education or medical care. The splendour of the 16th-century frescoes in the Sistine Hall was not enough to soften the impact of the stories and testimonies reported by nuns from all over the world during the Global Jubilee Conference with women religious held Thursday, 23 January, in the Vatican Apostolic Library.
The Conference, promoted by the Dicastery for Communication with the support of the Hilton Foundation together we collaborate on the Pentecost Project in the context of the Jubilee dedicated to communicators, was intended to be a platform and a showcase for the experiences, works, and missions of women religious from around the world, and to show how various forms of media β both old and new β are fundamental tools for these experiences, works and missions.
Thanks to social media, radios, websites or simply listening, the little South American girl was taken to a migrant reception centre, then to Tennessee, and where she lost her limbs, she regained her smile; the little Filipino girl was saved from the horrors of the web; the Ugandan women learnt to sew bags and clothes, providing for their personal needs but also for those of the village that had rejected them.
All this was thanks to communication, understood in the etymological sense: "communication as a reciprocal gift of self," as Paolo Ruffini, Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, explained in his opening greeting. Fifteen speakers with a large female presence, 12 out of 15 gave engaging testimonies from disaster-stricken areas of Africa, Europe, or South East Asia during the event, which gave the appearance of a cross between a press conference, a training course, and a round table.
