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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.'"
I hope he warns them about FBI posing as 13-year-old choirboys.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Well, could bring a new definition to "flame war" when the comments section of the blog turns ugly.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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
I don't know. I'm not Catholic, but I read Fr. Z's blog at wdtprs.com fairly frequently. It's not spam by any stretch. It's interesting to peep into another world.
Please, just please make it be one domain, like religiousblogs.com
What a wonderful time and space saving idea. Hey, while we're at it, lets limit and compact all thought on the Internet. We'll start by forcing all geeks into one domain... something like geekblogs.com, and why stop there? We'll put political people into one domain and... by the way, who do we put in charge of forcing all this to happen?
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 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
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
(I was tempted to add a "smiley", but decided it would be inappropriate. What we need is more like an "evil grinney", but I don't know if there's an ASCII symbol for that.)
>:D
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
So now I can look forward to being aggressively proselytized on the web as well as by obnoxious yokels in the real world. Wonderful.
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.
Maybe the next time the Pope is online he could do a bit of reading on the effectiveness of condoms in stopping the spread of AIDS. He might learn something and then he would have something better to say to people in Africa.
Does that count as Catholic-bashing?
> 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.
Did you know the rate of child molestation among priests is at least more than 400% of that of the overall population? Even the Church's own Archbishop Tomasi puts the rate of sexual abusers among priests at 5% "over the past 50 years" although he does assure us that "this figure was comparable with that of other groups and denominations". Remember, Tomasi represents a group that worked to cover up this abuse for half a century and does so still today. The highest rate ever alleged by the overall population (according to civilian statistics, not the church's) is about 0.4%. Most researchers put the overall number at closer to 0.2%. Most lay researchers put the rate of abuse among priests at closer to 7.5% which would be more than 10 times the overall rate.
You can call it trolling or flamebaiting all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that priests bugger children a lot more than the rest of us.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!