“Cultivate spirit of listening” to Deliver Balanced Stories: Zambian Bishop to Journalists

He says, “Listening is the first indispensable ingredient of dialogue and good communication. Communication does not take place if listening has not taken place first, and there is no good journalism without the ability to listen.”

Failure to pay attention to what others say often leads to aggression, Bishop Kalumba says, and adds that by paying attention to other speakers and what they say, journalists can improve their communication skills. 

To develop the spirit of listening, the Catholic Bishop who has been at the helm of Zambia’s Livingstone Diocese since his Episcopal Ordination in September 2016 challenges journalists to examine their assumptions and perceptions of reality before publishing anything.

“It is essential to know how to listen, to be ready to change one's mind and to modify one’s initial assumptions,” the 55-year-old Zambian Bishop says ahead of the annual event that Pope Paul VI established in 1967 to provide an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of modern means of communication.

“Genuine dialogue and good communication demand that we listen to one another,” he reiterates, and goes on to cite the Holy Father’s Message for WCD 2022 saying, “Pope Francis says, we should listen with ears of God so that we may speak the will of God.”

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While listening does not imply uniformity or conformity of voices, the Catholic Bishop says that paying attention to what others say “allows a wide range of voices to respond to harmony and unity of purpose.” 

"The art of listening is not a theory or a technique but the openness of hearts that makes closeness possible. The heart is the genuine seed of listening," the Bishop Director of the Commission for Communications of the ZCCB says in the video recording published May 24.

Magdalene Kahiu is a Kenyan journalist with passion in Church communication. She holds a Degree in Social Communications from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA). Currently, she works as a journalist for ACI Africa.