Pity the poor bishops...

Dear friends,

I was having a conversation on the phone last night with a friend about yesterday's email commentary about the difficult position the Bishops find themselves in these days. We concluded that the Bishops and Cardinals probably do not have a very good understanding of how the Church is being portrayed out in cyberspace — this vast new frontier, now not just including desk-bound computers but all sorts of mobile and portable devices, that is fast replacing telephone and public broadcast networks as the principal way in which many people communicate today.

Most of them are older than most of us in this community and these technological developments are not within the grasp of some of them. Some of us know some priests who still haven't caught up with the fax machine and that technology is fast becoming as redundant as the telex machine.

Has anyone ever done an audit...

Has anyone ever done an audit for the Church not on how many people use computers, or how many computers Catholics or the Church owns, but on the content of what is transmitted in the name of Catholicism via the internet? I doubt it. I suspect they are going to be pretty horrified when the full impact hits them and they begin to realise that sitting right there under their noses is one of the principal reasons why religion, and the Church, is so much "on the nose" in most people's eyes in modern Western societies. In many ways one could exclaim "the inmates have taken over the asylum" and the doctors and managers of the institution don't even know it.

In the circles in which I used to move in Western Australia I am certain there was this belief that anybody who sat down writing in cyberspace was some kind of nutter. Western Australia is still very much a frontier culture and not as sophisticated as the Eastern seaboard and over there anybody who engages in intellectual endeavour, or engages in argument about public policy through, say, letters to the newspaper, is viewed with suspicion and as a bit of a "nutter", or "dingbat" or not quite "the full two bob". I picked up this sense in Church circles that the internet was chiefly viewed as some "den of iniquity" largely populated by dirty old men looking for porn, young children doing school assignments (who had to be protected from the dirty old men), and raunchy divorced and single dames looking for a bloke via the many online dating services. "Normal people" didn't go there. For example, The Catholic Record newspaper is the only Catholic newspaper in Australia which is still not using the internet. They've had a couple of goes at it but after a month or three the enthusiasm (or budget) wanes again and no further updates are forthcoming. I still have a copy of the email I sent to them in 2001 offering to provide them with an online presence for a pittance. I'm still waiting for a reply. I literally could have starved — and did!

In many ways the culture in the wild west is reflected more generally throughout the Church. Bishops have a million pretty mundane priorities they have to deal with in their work-a-day lives — intervening in some crisis where Fr so and so has chucked a wobbly; making sure the books are balanced; dealing with the crisis caused by the shortage of priests; overseeing more departments and agencies than a minister in the Federal Government; making sure the books balance in budgets that are as large as those of some of the largest city councils in this nation; as well as trying to find some time to actually keep up with the flow of information published around the world each day by the Church and making some sense of it in order to themselves preach and teach. There ain't much time to be left over giving time to thinking about the strategic use of the internet and, in any case, the internet has global reach so they tend not to think of it as a priority because it is not part of their local responsibility.

I suppose the bishops think they are doing something about the internet via Church Resources but little do they realise that Church Resources is like a thalidomide baby. It has been born without arms. It is very deliberately by policy choice "not a publisher". Politically CathNews and all the other worthy internet initiatives spawned by Church Resources simply could not exist politically if Fr Michael Kelly, the person responsible for setting the whole thing up, ran around proclaiming he was publishing anything. The bishops wouldn't have a mechanism to deal with the complaints that land on their desks from this one and that one complaining what has been written in the news' bulletins each day. The Church has to be a publisher if it is to survive and prosper in the modern world. But here is one of the principal internet communication agencies for the Catholic Church in Australia hamstrung from its very foundations because it is unable to say anything and basically only repeats what other people are saying in other media. As important, and worthy a service that is in providing us with some overview of how the Church is being portrayed in the secular and religious media, it does not actually help spread the Good News. At best it is some kind of holding operation.

When I used to work in a number of Catholic agencies I was constantly bemused by the attitude of superiors who, while keen to be seen to be "with it" in internet technologies, worried themselves sick when it actually came to publishing anything of real substance on the net. I am sure armies are employed by the Church internationally in editing out what is NOT going to be said or published. What eventually appears on the net is often so milked of its real information that it's a wonder anybody wants to read it by the time it is ready for public consumption.

For example do yourself a favour and go read the reports and minutes that they are required to publish from time to time for reasons of public accountability of the meetings of the committees that run various agencies in the Church. You'd have to be Jesus himself in order to try and mind read what actually was decided, let alone even discussed, in some of these bureaucratic offices. (Sadly a lot of that has been caused, I am absolutely sure, by the activities of the thought police and the asylum inmates who have virtually shut down completely now the flow of accountability information from within the Church bureaucracies.)

We, the Church community, need to do something. But what? I hope we might at least bring to the attention of our bishops that they have a little problem here. They need to deal with it if they are serious about wanting to re-evangelise the world — and their local parishes.

Blessings, Brian Coyne

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