Mexican cardinal warns scenarios where the cell phone affects Catholics

Cardinal Felipe Arizmendi, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas (Mexico), warned about the risks that the uncontrolled use of the cell phone brings with it, even among the Catholics, noting that their excessive use can make people distance each other and of reality.

In a text shared with ACI Prensa, the 85 -year -old purple identified five spaces where Catholics have shown cell phone dependence, affecting interpersonal attention and relationships:

• CONFESSIONAL: Arizmendi mentioned, for example, the case of a person who consulted him “if his sacramental confession had been valid, because the priest who attended her in the confessional throughout the time was seeing and driving his cell phone.”

  As he explained, although the sacrament was valid, because “God sees the heart,” a reproach said for “the lack of respect on the part of the priest”, stressing that confession is a “very sacred moment and the faithful deserve all respect, be heard and treated with the mind and with the heart, in the style of Jesus.”

• Spiritual retreats: The purple pointed out that in some spiritual retreats that he has taught in his long career for priests, seminarians or religious, “it is common for some to be more aware of the cell phone, than of meditation.”

• Pastoral assemblies and meetings: He added that in assemblies or meetings, politicians, bishops and pastoral agents sometimes “vote without knowing what is being decided, or think without taking into account what others already expressed.”

  In his experience, he said that he has observed that people are “more pending of the latest news or information on their cell phone, most of the inconsequential times, than what they were being treated.”

• Families and couples: The Mexican cardinal regretted that in some families “at food time they no longer talk, but that everyone is seeing their cell phone”, and in the same way “it happens among the same bride and groom, who spend long times on their cell phone, instead of sharing life.”

CAUSES AND RESPONSIBLE USE

Cardinal Arizmendi acknowledged that, well employed, the cell phone is “an extraordinary help, the result of the great intellectual capacity that God has put in our minds,” however, for some people, “if they forget or lose it, they feel lost.”

The purple that they are in cases like this that the use of the cell phone becomes an instrument that “that ties so much to the people who cannot live without all hours pending of it, and with that they distance themselves from people and reality.”

Therefore, he proposed to “relate better, to know several options and decide many things in life!”, And he added that the most effective way to reverse this trend is to educate “to be free and know when to use the cell phone and when not take it into account.”

“Let’s put ourselves in the place of the person we have in front: if we hear it without listening to it because we are pending cell phone, it will not be taken into account. Loving others is also to attend them, before the cell phone,” concluded the cardinal.