Most Holy Father,

Thank you very much for meeting with the members, consultors and staff of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications on the occasion of our Council's Plenary Assembly.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Pastoral Instruction "Aetatis Novae", which had been approved and indeed improved before its publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of which you were then the Prefect.

Next year will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vatican Television Center.

While our late Holy Father Pope John Paul II emphasized in his final major document, "Il Rapido Sviluppo", the very rapid development of technologies of communications, this technogical revolution is taking place at an ever greater pace -- with the subsequent decline in newspaper readership, with the increasing popularity of Internet, with its opportunities and its dangers, and with new ways of receiving and recording both audio and video signals.

It is in this context that we are meeting and it is in this context that we seek your guidance in a world which needs the message of Jesus more than ever but in which the noise of competing messages threatens to drown out the message of the Gospel. We ask not only your guidance and your prayers but also on your blessing on us, on our loved ones and on our work.

Thank you.