It’s a sign of the dizzying speed with which technological change now drives cultural, political, economic, and even religious change that churches find themselves obliged to give serious thought to blogs: fight ’em or join ’em or what? Since fighting pretty plainly is out of the question, joining seems the answer. But how?
Already the blogosphere is a factor in religious affairs. To take one instance, consider something Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote about recent elections in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Calling the “rise of the blogosphere” a major factor in the outcome of the vote, Dionne reported that “an active network of Baptist bloggers” had given forces seeking leadership change a way of circumventing older channels of communication controlled by the denomination's establishment. In the end, the bloggers got what they wanted.
But, you say, the Catholic Church doesn't have elections. Strictly speaking, that isn't so. Electoral processes aren't unknown in the Catholic world. The pope is elected (by the cardinals). Heads of religious orders are elected (by the members or their representatives). Officers of the national bishops' conference are elected (by the bishops).
Still, it's true that voting isn't the ordinary method of choosing people for most leadership positions in the Catholic system. Whether it should or could be more widely employed are separate questions, not considered here. At the moment, the point is only that Internet weblogs have proliferated in the Catholic sector in the last couple of years, and Catholics bloggers are having an impact, though one admittedly not measurable by election results.
That's not entirely good or entirely bad, but a mix of both. On the one hand, blogging is a potent tool for expressing the responsible public opinion in the Church that's been endorsed at the highest levels from Pope Pius XII to Pope John Paul II.
If anyone thinks public opinion doesn't belong in the Catholic Church, he or she will find the papal Magisterium on the other side of the argument. As a matter of fact, in the last major document of his pontificate, Pope John Paul echoed Pope Pius in declaring that if public opinion were absent from Catholic life, “something would be missing from the life of the Church.”
On the other hand, no one even slightly familiar with the blogosphere can help being aware that it's the kingdom of the gossips, the ideologues, the cranks, and the no-holds-barred venters of spleen a place in cyberspace where opinion, rumor, ad hominem nastiness, and unfettered ego-tripping are par for the course.
Weblogs are an extraordinary medium for the instantaneous exchange of views and information among activists. Their speed, outreach, and unofficial character give them their influence. But the blogs lack the checks and balances of traditional journalism and manifest a kind of congenital unreliability. Like great spinners of yarns, bloggers tell fascinating tales that sometimes even turn out to be true. But the best rule of thumb when consulting a blog is “Reader, beware.”
My guess is that the long-term positive influence of blogs in the Catholic sector will be to hasten the breakdown of walls of bureaucratic concealment and encourage a significant opening-up in governance and administration and communication as a measure of enlightened accommodation to changing times.
If so, that will be consistent with something the Vatican said several years ago in a document on the Church and the Internet. It spoke of new media now including blogs as potentially effective means of “realizing in a concrete manner” the Church's fundamental nature as a community of faith.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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