In the early days of social media, long before AI gained prominence, the late Pope Benedict XVI warned us about the superficiality of relationships in the digital realm. The late Pontiff wrote, "The concept of friendship has enjoyed a renewed prominence in the vocabulary of the new digital social networks that have emerged in the last few years. The concept is one of the noblest achievements of human culture. It is in and through our friendships that we grow and develop as humans. For this reason, true friendship has always been seen as one of the greatest goods any human person can experience. We should be careful, therefore, never to trivialize the concept or the experience of friendship. It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop on-line friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbors and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation” (Message of Pope Benedict XVI for the 43rd World Communications Day, May 24, 2009).
In the first letter of St. Peter that we heard in today’s scripture reading, Peter invites his readers to love one another deeply from the heart. He used the adverb ektenos, which appears only twice in the New Testament: in Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and in Peter's own prayer in jail (Acts 12:5). Peter understands that Christians have become the children of God through salvation brought by Christ through His death on the cross. The result of this salvation is the new community of Christians with a new life of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ and sincere obedience to the truth. This perspective appears throughout the New Testament, where familial language is used of the Christian community. Early Christians addressed each other as "brother" and "sister." More than two thousand years have passed since Peter wrote his letter, and the world has changed with digital technology, but the question is whether the digital network and connectivity make us closer to one another and strengthen our relationship as "brothers" and "sisters" in Christ, or perhaps this new technological era makes us even detach from one another and especially our loved ones.