Pope Francis, noting that the term "brain rot" was the Oxford dictionary's word of the year for 2024, urged people to rediscover the "courage to free the heart from what corrupts it" in a speech Saturday. "The choices of each of us count, for example, in expelling that 'brain rot' caused by the addiction to continuous scrolling on social media," he said, per ANSA. He asked: "Where can we find the cure for this disease if not in working, all together, on education, especially for young people?"
"We need courageous entrepreneurs, courageous computer engineers, so that the beauty of communication is not corrupted," Francis said. "Great changes cannot be the result of a multitude of sleeping minds, but rather begin with the communion of enlightened hearts." The pontiff was speaking at the Jubilee of the World of Communications, which was attended by around 9,000 journalists and other media workers from almost 140 countries, in person and online, euronews reports.
Francis called for freedom of the press to be defended and for unjustly imprisoned journalists to be freed. "Yours is a special responsibility. Yours is a precious task," he said, per ANSA. He urged Catholic media workers to put themselves on "the side of those who are marginalized, those who are neither seen nor heard and also to revive—in the hearts of those who read you, listen to you, watch you—the sense of good and evil and a nostalgia for the good that you tell and that, by telling, you bear witness to." (More Pope Francis stories.)
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