Next week, I will be presenting at a gathering of theologians, ethicists, and social scientists in Salzburg, Austria. The event, organised by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns, and its focus is democracy. Or more precisely, democracy under threat.
For many years now, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has affirmed democracy as the form of government perhaps most aligned with the dignity of the human person. But as authoritarianism surges globally and democratic institutions falter even in long-established liberal societies, there is a renewed urgency to ask: What can CST offer democracy today? And just as importantly, how must CST be renewed in dialogue with this crisis?
I have been asked to share my thoughts in a presentation and I am going to argue that one of the most overlooked threats to democracy today is not ideological extremism or political corruption – though both are real – but the slow corrosion of our moral attention, brought about by the very digital technologies that mediate our political lives.
Catholic tradition has long recognised that communication is a moral act. From the 1936 papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura to Pope Francis’ barbed critiques of digital culture in Fratelli Tutti, the Church has engaged media with a mixture of caution and hope. But we are now dealing with something new. Not cinema or radio, not even broadcast television. We live in a digital ecosystem – a regime of 24/7 connectivity where algorithms increasingly determine what we see, when we see it, and how we feel about it.
This environment is not neutral. It shapes what we pay attention to. It reshapes how we relate. And it forms the very conditions for discernment, deliberation, and democratic decision-making.
In Salzburg, I’ll propose that these digital infrastructures deform the “moral ecology” of democratic life. Drawing on the work of scholars like Shoshana Zuboff, James Williams, and Shannon Vallor, I suggest that surveillance capitalism has created what Catholic theology might rightly name a structure of sin: a system that violates dignity, undermines subsidiarity, and corrodes the common good.
Zuboff has shown how tech platforms harvest our behaviour for profit. Williams warns that our capacity for deep moral and civic attention – what he calls “daylight attention” – is being systematically undermined. Vallor, drawing on Aristotelian and Buddhist ethics, urges us to recover the virtues that digital life erodes. The Catholic tradition has the tools to engage these questions. But it must speak boldly and theologically, but it must resist the urge to reactionary moralism and defensiveness.
That is the proposal I bring to Salzburg: that the Church needs a new social encyclical on communication – a digital Rerum Novarum – that grapples with the attention economy as a moral economy. I drafted this argument before a more important Christian figure suggested a similar idea…! I think it would be exciting to try to draft an encyclical that defends the persistence of truth in our oceans of data, upholds subsidiarity not just in politics but in digital design, and renews our understanding of the person not as a mathematical model but as a being called to presence, patience, and participation.
This may seem a world away from our work at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. But in fact, it is intimately connected. Whether we are advocating for penal reform, addressing the housing crisis, or promoting ecological justice, we are constantly navigating the attention of a distracted public. We are trying to form consciences in a context that has been engineered for outrage and speed. We are, in our own way, working to build a culture formed by more than algorithms.
As Pope Francis said, we are not just living through a time of change, but a change of era. In that context, the Catholic Social Tradition must be prepared not only to analyse the moment but to offer vision: of a society attentive to truth, committed to the common good, and capable of listening in love.
Salzburg is a long way from Dublin, but the questions we’ll be asking there echo powerfully in Ireland today. How do we form democratic citizens when our capacity for shared attention is shattered? How do we resist the pull of populism, not just with policy, but with presence? What does it mean to be people of communion in a culture of distraction?
These are theological questions. And they are questions worth our attention.
