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Pope Urges Priests To Go Forth and Blog
Hugh Pickens writes "Pope Benedict XV, whose own presence on the Web has grown in recent years, is urging priests to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and to engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures. 'The spread of multimedia communications and its rich "menu of options" might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web,' but priests are 'challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,' says the Pope. The message from the Pope, prepared for the World Day of Communications, suggests such possibilities as images, videos, animated features, blogs, and Web sites and adds that young priests should become familiar with new media while still in seminary, though the Pope stresses that the use of new technologies must reflect theological and spiritual principles. Many priests and top prelates already interact with the faithful online, and one of Benedict's advisers has his own Facebook profile. So does the archbishop of Los Angeles. The Pope adds, 'I renew the invitation to make astute use of the unique possibilities offered by modern communications. May the Lord make all of you enthusiastic heralds of the Gospel in the new "agorà" which the current media are opening up.'"
Please, just please make it be one domain, like religiousblogs.com. Nothing worse than all the spam and pushed things and messages on the internet is such religious ones.
I do not think there is any god anyway. It's as likely possibility than that we would be living in a computer simulation. In fact, I suspect the later one is more likely possible.
Religion is something that was used in old times to control people and have them do "moral" actions (moral here being what the government considered good). It also was used to slay millions of people in crusades to other regions. The real reason most likely even wasn't about believing in god, it was the same power game that there is today. This doesn't apply just to Christians, it applies to every religion. Just see what a freaking mess the middle-east and areas around Israel is. All of that just because you believe in an imaginary person while the other person believes in an another imaginary person.
But since we are already talking about the god vs. computer simulation, is there any reason why we couldn't be living in someones simulation? Every year our own computer technology goes leaps forwards. It might seem simulating our whole world would be too much for a computer, but who really knows what the limits are? And if we are living in a simulation, how could we know we aren't? The system would prevent us from doing so.
And I do not mean this as the typical Matrix like system, which would be kind of stupid. I mean it as something where we don't exist at all outside of the simulation, other than maybe as some processes running in a data center (or someones bedroom closet). While I dont spend my days thinking about that, I think its a lot more likely thing than there being some invisible, everything knowing, a man who created everything somewhere in the space who listens to everyones wishes and tricks around with them.
I hope he warns them about FBI posing as 13-year-old choirboys.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Evens the playing field, makes what they preach much more vulnerable if it's not restricted to small community or closed channel of information.
I love it.
That's the silliest thing I've read this week. There are hundreds of millions... if not more... copies of Bibles in the world. There are thousands of churches and parishes. There are televsion and radio networks. You make it sound like they've been trying to hide, to keep what they teach to a small circle. Are you kidding? It's their job to go forth and preach. It's their job to interact with the public. "Closed channel of information"? Do you honestly think some nasty comments at a priest's blog is somehow going to usher in a glorious new era of atheism? Seriously?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The Internet is a great place to let people know God is real.
True. Before the Internet, how many people had even heard of the one true supreme being?
You guys mean Pope Benedict XVI, right?
-- Old Man Kensey
You can get sexually abused by a girl on slashdot now? Why don't people *tell* me these things?
If the Pope was serious about using new communication technology, he should make the entire Vatican Secret Archives searchable on the Internet.
"you really haven't ever noticed that the thought of religious communities lives almost exclusivity in controlled (not in "Orwellian" meaning of control, ffs, in which you seem to interpret it) environments?"
Show me someone that's advocating a position... on anything... that isn't "controlling" the message. That's what makes it a message. It's a point of view. Doesn't matter if it's coming from a church or club or political party or business. Everyone from the GNU people to the Pope "control" their message.
"Heck, even such overboard things as infiltrating those communities become bearable and easily done."
Again, you're falsely assuming some kind of conspiritorial security system here. Infiltrate? The whole point is to bring people into the church. Why would you need to infiltrate it? Unlike something like Scientology, Catholics are pretty open about their beliefs, practices, and methods. You're seeing conspiracy activity where there is none. Go to any Catholic church, walk up to the priest and tell him "I'm an atheist, and I want to see how and why you do things here". As long as you're not there to be an ass and disrupt the service, he'll invite you right in. He sees it as both a duty and a spiritual opportunity to bring you to mass, not some kind of invasion. So again, why would you think that flaming a priest's blog is going to make much of a difference?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
He gave a sermon on iptables in linux and simple object access protocols. It was call "Pope on a SOAP on a ROPE"... I'll get my coat
I thought that there had been an effort to keep sex offenders away from social networking technology...
That's a real problem. Catholic priests should be monitored to make sure they're not communicating with minors. The Catholic Church, after all, is the only organization to have a slush fund to pay off victims of their pedophiles.
You know what the Catholic Church needs with a LAMP server (or similar)? It some unified website, administered by regional authorities or the Vatican itself, which will provide a good way to find parish locations and mass times for each and every parish in a first-world country where Internet access is common. Then, when I'm on a trip to White Plains and three hours jet-lagged, I can get some idea of when and where I can attend church on a Sunday. Or when I'm back in Silicon Valley and it's a random Holy Day of Obligation in the middle of the week, I can know where to go after work (or possibly before work or over a lunch break). Right now, it's a crapshoot as to whether the church even has a website.
Calendering. Please. Inter-parish calendaring, ideally; I'd love to know everything going on in the Diocese of San Jose at a glance. Bulletins would be nice too, even if they're just .pdfs. Maybe they could coordinate those with what'stheirface, LPI? those liturgical-publishers who seem to put out a lot of those.
If you're looking for gravy, throw in a quick podcast (and computerized transcription) of the homilies. If they can standardize on something, it would be pretty easy to plug into most existing parish sound systems, and reasonably cheap.
Next step out: Get the church behind some sort of free-content/Creative Commons angle with its liturgical music -- not necessarily to the exclusion of all else, mind you, but choir directors shouldn't have to jump through copyright hoops to legally express praise and worship. That, of all things, should be Free.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Roughly a BILLION dollars in pedo payoffs worldwide make that post a candidate for Funny, not Flamebait.
From rescuing Nazis (not to mention largely ignoring the Holocaust, if THAT wasn't worthy of excommunication what is?) in Operation Ratline after WWII to playing hide-the-pedo across international borders, the Vatican has forfeited any respect except by its own brainwashed flock.
Enjoy!
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/
Justice, courtesy of another inmate:
http://www.boston.com/news/specials/geoghan/
Some fangirl support:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/23/coakley_details_her_role_in_1995_probation_deal_for_geoghan/?page=3
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You chose a pretty poor example. In the english-speaking world, priests originally used latin versions of the bible. A version of the bible that could be read and understood by the common man was viewed as a threat by the religious institutions and *violently* repressed. I believe, and it's reasonable to argue, that the fall of the bible from a carefully-guarded source to something that the entire internet can pick apart contributed to the rise of atheism.
Currently, the *contents* of sermons and services are not available for that same scrutiny. If religious indoctrination and propaganda starts to move online, that is a huge win for skeptics.
Currently, the *contents* of sermons and services are not available for that same scrutiny. If religious indoctrination and propaganda starts to move online, that is a huge win for skeptics.
That's somewhat changing, too...in my country (90+ % Catholic officially) there were cases of, simply put, embarrassing sermons which were recorded. Of course those willing to record sermons and make a big deal out of ridiculous ones aren't very happy to force themselves regularly through mass.
Net, as we pointed out, changes this.
One that hath name thou can not otter
If the current Pope is telling priests to go forth and blog
how would the situation of a Church in SecondLife be handled??
(bonus round question are there any real cross and steeple churches with SL locations??)
Personally i would challenge churches to extend their reach into this wilderness
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Posting your crap online makes it that much easier to ignore than if you bother people in the streets or coming knocking on their doors bothering them in the name of your chosen mythology.
This invitation should extend to all religious institutions and their constituents.
So now I can look forward to being aggressively proselytized on the web as well as by obnoxious yokels in the real world. Wonderful.
What sznupi said in the original post is completely correct, this is a very bad idea for the church. It's not because of any conspiracy, or nasty comments on a priest's blog, but this is going to give them huge exposure.
Every slip-up from a member of clergy that's posted online will be number one on digg immediately. Even if they take it down, a simple screencap will emerge to resurrect the story into immortality. The possibility for PR disaster is huge. Right now the main audience of anything a clergyman says is of course the faithful. The internet will not be so forgiving!
Some priest is going to discover spam (which fits completely with the quote from His Holyness.) Some priest is going to get caught talking dirty to a 4chan prankster posing as a young boy. Someone's going to try using jesus as a password on a priest's blog to write something blasphemous or immoral... You don't need faith to know that one or all of the above are coming!
Wow - this Benedict XV must have been an amazing visionary to tell priests to blog, given that he died in 1922!
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Well, the phone was invented over 100 years before the Almighty Iphone came and revolutionised the world, so I presume they've already had time to think things through.
> Do you honestly think some nasty comments at a priest's blog is somehow going to usher in a glorious new era of atheism? Seriously?
All the religious people whining about the so-called "new atheist movement" seem to think so. A few prominent atheists publish books at the same time, and suddenly we're on the warpath. What has actually changed is the internet, which isn't controlled by television producers and newspaper editors. Religion has no leverage where people aren't afraid of offending customers or voters.
http://www.masstimes.org/
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Its time to properly address the issues and errors of our philosophies..... Imagine open source religion.
It's far too late for that; all the world's religions have been "open source" for centuries. It's true that as recently as 7 or 8 centuries back, the religious leaders did team up with the political leaders to introduce this new "copyright" concept, whose purpose was to limit the copying (by scribes mostly) of religious texts to a small number of carefully-controlled publishing houses. But then some interfering tech geeks developed printing presses, and pretty soon it was out of control.
Some of the first printed texts (and the topic of the first copyright trials and executions) were the major religious texts of the day. This eventually led to near-universal literacy in several parts of the world, and the leaders found it impossible to keep cheap copies of their religious texts out of the hands of people who could read the scriptures themselves. Life has been tough for the religious leaders ever since then, as the local monopolies over religious thought were lost.
Fact is, printed copies of all the world's religious texts have been widely available for going on half a millennium now. As with open-source software, it has led to both widespread forking of the religions and widespread understanding of how religions work. Or, more often, how they fail to work. (Just ask a few Catholics about their ban on priestly sex.) Nowadays, you can rapidly download most of the holy texts for free from somewhere on the Internet. And it's not hard to find online discussions of many of them. If not, you can easily start your own discussion (or religion).
Of course, most religious organizations probably haven't profited from this open publication. The story with software isn't quite as clear yet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know you're joking, but that raises some interesting questions. As long as it's direct communication between the priest and person, could that kind of stuff... like confession be done over an iPhone (or IRC, instant messaging, etc)? I wonder if something like that has ever been done over, say, videoconferencing?
The short answer is "no", it seems; this document prepared by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications indicates a very firm negative on that -- though it states it as an assumption, rather than a policy ("Virtual reality is no substitute for the ... sacraments, and shared worship in a flesh-and-blood human community. There are no sacraments on the Internet ...").
Suppose someone is dying, and is requesting last rites, and you just can't get a priest there physically in time?
My understanding is that in in extremo situations, very few rules apply. The Eucharist can be administered under the weirdest of circumstances, people of any religion (or no religion) can perform baptisms. It'd be up to the local bishop to decide, of course, but I'd guess when someone is dying just about anything goes.
21st century... damn keyboard.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
I'm an athiest who reads a Catholic priests blog, listens to their podcast and their nationally syndicated talk show. He's been doing these for years. He even played around in Second Life for a while. Amazingly, he hasn't imploded yet due to spinning out of control.
Sure, the Vatican has an internal library they don't let just anyone into, and they respect the privacy of their parishoners who come to confession. Well good for them. You are imagining a vast conspiracy of secrecy where there is none.
I was thinking the same thing. Although I was raised Catholic and received the relevant sacraments, I'm not religious and haven't even stepped foot in a church for a number of years. I've considered checking it out again for no real reason, but it feels awkward to me to just show up on Sunday (and I'm not that committed to the idea anyway).
If I were able to sort of "check it out" by reading the priest's blog or whatever, it would make my decision to show up and participate much easier. Either I'll decide that it's just not my thing, or my somewhat renewed interest leads me to actually go.
Seems like a good idea to me. And why stop at just Catholicism? There are at least 5 different churches of varying denominations within a few miles of my house and I don't really know the differences between them. I could hit up a few of the sites and see what they're all about. If nothing else, at least I'll learn something. (And to be honest, they might have a web presence right now and I never thought about it. Time for some googling...)
That would have been a great joke if it worked. Unfortunately, transcendental numbers are on the real line.
"Go Forth and Sodomize" just doesn't have the same appeal.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I love that. Our most sacred rules apply always, except when it's inconvenient or bad PR to enforce them.
I think we should try and move away from actions in the past. Sure we should forget some of the horrors, but considering most of the ills in this world is caused by people living in intolerance of a bygone age.
Yes the roman Catholic Church did a lot of wrong in the past, but they ARE changing. Remember, current believers who still swear by the 6000 year old earth are NOT catholics (it was a catholic priest who indeed first theorized the Big Bang) .
I am not a catholic myself, I am a Hindu Humanist. But my wife is Roman Catholic. I do occasionally visit a church, and she visits a temple. We have our own beliefs, yet we share ours with each other. We are both scientists, and do rationalize beliefs based on science, and need for humanity, and common sense. Yet we do have a faith.
When we go to church/temple, we are not looked down upon.. never. In fact, we receive a lot of respect for our attitude and reasoned thinking.
And more important we get along JUST fine.
Have a nice day!