Technology and the home will be “a huge theme” at next year’s World Meeting of Families in Ireland, the secretary general of the international event, Fr Timothy Bartlett, has said, writes Sarah Mac Donald.
Speaking to the media at Knock shrine in County Mayo, to launch the one-year countdown to the gathering, Fr Bartlett said the impact of technology on family life was “a real issue”.
He referred to the phenomenon of everybody sitting around the family table preoccupied with their own phones and asked what this was doing to communication within the family: “What is it doing in terms of conflict and tension in the home?”
Fr Bartlett highlighted how Ireland is host to the European headquarters of many tech companies such as Google and Facebook, and expressed the hope that they could contribute to a conversation about how technology can serve the good of humanity, especially the family.
Speaking to The Tablet, Bishop Fintan Monahan of Killaloe said the trend for people to be on their screens rather than communicating with those around them is seen in all walks of life from schools to married couples.
“It affects marriages as Accord has been pointing out,” he said, in a reference to the Catholic marriage support agency’s finding that technology is increasingly a source of friction among couples.
“There are good sides and there are down sides to social media. Pope Francis’ Twitter account has millions of followers and it is a very effective way of getting out a positive message. But there is no substitute for a mother and a father sitting with their children in genuine communication.”
The president of the World Meeting of Families, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, said the international gathering was about the “reality of family life”.
“It is about the love of husbands and wives for each other, about the ups and downs that you will find in any family – moments of joy, moments of sorrow, moments of disappointment, moments of breakdown and also moments of reconciliation. They are the everyday realities of every family.”
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