Sister Rose Pacatte will address evangelization in the digital age

Sister Rose Pacatte, FSP, will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Media Conference, June 7 in Baltimore.

By Christopher Gunty
Catholic Review
Archdiocese of Baltimore

BALTIMORE – For her 50th anniversary of religious profession – and 55th in the convent – Daughter of St. Paul Sister Rose Pacatte asked the order’s superior general, Sister Anna Caiazza, if she could spend a year in either Singapore, Africa or Rome to refresh her view of the world.

The superior immediately invited Sister Rose to come to Rome, so in August 2022, she packed up and moved to Rome, for what was originally supposed to last through the end of the World Synod of Bishops so she could report on it for St. Anthony Messenger magazine. The synod was since extended to October 2024, so the “media nun” isn’t sure when her Roman expedition will end.

She’s taking it with a grain of salt. This is a woman religious who has been featured on TV game shows (including “1 vs. 100”) and presented the Golden Raspberry “Redeemer” award, which honors an actor who has made up for his or her past transgressions against cinema with better work, a break from the Razzies honoring the “worst” in cinema.

And after all, Sister Rose gets to live and work in Rome these days, where “I love going to morning Mass early at St. Peter’s, confession, prayer in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel (I call it one-stop shopping), walking around and below St. Peters (in the grottos where many popes are buried), and reflecting on our beautiful faith,” she said via email.

She and other Daughters of St. Paul do some “church-visiting” around Rome, accompanied by one of the sisters who works at the Vatican and has been in Rome for seven years, so it is like “walking with Google.”

“But nothing overwhelms my soul more than seeing the dome of St. Peter’s rise up in front of me from the various streets that approach it. It is a marvel of science, architecture, art, history and the human spirit,” Sister Rose said.

She will take a break from Rome this summer as she comes to Baltimore to give a keynote presentation on evangelization in the digital age. She said, “The chatbot GPT-3, as it likes to be called (I asked its preference in an interview I did with it for the National Catholic Reporter), and I were working together on a warm-up act to my lunchtime talk,” she said of her collaboration with ChatAI.

While based in Rome, Sister Rose has taught classes on digital literacy, especially as it related to church communications. “Digital literacy, like media literacy and media mindfulness, is important so that we can access, analyze, evaluate, create, consume and navigate all forms of media.”

The emergence and enhancements of AI – artificial intelligence – show that the popular language module can create stories, images and videos by culling and integrating documents and copying voices, which makes it hard, at times, to discern truth from fiction, she said.

Recent AI-generated images of Pope Francis wearing a puffy, white, winter coat or playing basketball just after getting out of the hospital highlight the quality of faked content.

Sister Rose noted that the new reality requires critical thinking and asking questions in the search for truth; this “leads us to participate in church, community, society and democracy. We don’t have to wring our hands as people of faith.”

It presents a great challenge and opportunity as it requires those in the church to be information skeptics – but not cynics – who “engage in this ever-evolving and emerging culture by knowing how to create fresh, relevant and faithful content for the digital culture. … Being collaborative in community and mission is a key to success in the digital apostolate,” she said.

Though Sister Rose is not sure how this adventure in Rome will last – “it’s not really a sabbatical, but using a different perspective,” she said – she continues to write for U.S. publications including National Catholic Reporter and St. Anthony Messenger, while she has also participated in film festivals in Venice and Terni in Italy. In January, she spent two weeks in Prague, Czech Republic, giving some conferences organized by the Daughters of St. Paul there on Evangelization in a Digital World.