A Lament, A Tribute and a Plea!

Dear Friends,

What a wonderful get together a small group of us had yesterday beside the Lake at Narabean for what might turn out to be the inaugural Catholica Christmas party. As I wrote on the members' forum, these occasions I find very much like what happens when a group of football fans or cricket fans get together and recount all the balls that were kicked, or hit, or bowled in some game and we laugh ourselves silly at all the googlies that we bowled. There's also serious business attended to as well. In our case, what basically brings us together is our faith — our shared sense of believe in a loving and benevolent God who desires nothing less than our total happiness and love for one another. Sadly, one of the laments that came up in our conversation yesterday — the friendships of all of us there yesterday actually go back four or five years now to when we all met via the CathNews Discussion Board — is that it has become much more difficult to "share our stories" in the way we used to on the internet. We recalled some of those most intimate moments that we had exprienced where we had shared the pains and tribulations in our lives and how it had been the sharing of those stories that had formed these communities that had eventually become the Catholica Australia community. They were stories sometimes of grief when a loved one died, sometimes of the joy we shared at the birth of a new member of our family — either the birth of a new baby or, as in Milly's case, the birth of a new song, or for others the birth of some new hobby or project.

At one point in the conversation someone made the observation that what being a Christian is essentially all about is "sharing our stories — that's essentially what Jesus was doing" — and we all ended up agreeing. Our lament was that it seems to have become so much more difficult to do that. Perhaps we've already passed the "golden age" of the internet when, in our innocence and naivette, we frolicked in the sand like excited children on their first family picnic. We were not afraid to open up to complete strangers and share our vulnerabilities and trust. Slowly though, over time, we have become more wary because so often our trust has been betrayed. Seemingly there are other people constantly out there who seem to live their lives by wanting to point up other people's "sins" and failings. It seems to be the way they bring meaning into their own loveless lives — seemingly our of their own desperate search for love, recognition and a cry to be respected by someone; anyone else.

It's not just a problem in Church. Opening up my inbox this morning there were a total of 58 unopened new messages but at least 20 of them were spam that had somehow got around the spam filters that I use. Spam seems to be slowly shutting down the internet. It's rubbish spewed out on the internet by individuals who do not value this great innovation as an opportunity for "building the human community" but who want to exploit the human community for their own selfish ends. Increasingly, as has happened in the physical world, and in these internet communities, we have had to fence ourselves in behind spam filters and moderators and policemen and we can't "share our stories" in the ways we so innocently did just a few years ago.

What I think we all would have agreed to yesterday is that what this Catholica Australia initiative is most about is not the sharing of news, or all the "politics" of endeavouring to rebuild our Church, it is about trying to create a safe place where we can "share our stories" — where we can share our vulnerabilities and anxieties, where we can laugh at ourselves, where we can celebrate with one another when we have "Good News" to share with one another.

And that leads me to today's commentaries. In the first one I want to share with you a beautiful post from a Dominican nun who posted what she described as perhaps her last post on the CathNews Discussion Board on Saturday. I was so moved that I endeavoured to repond with my own tribute to her— and to all those women and men who sacrificed their lives to build our Church in this country. <Click HERE to read my thank you to the women and men religious who built our Church and who lifte us Catholics out of the social gutter in our own land.>

And our plea today comes in the next instalment of Professor Len Swidler's series where he puts the case for a greater spirit of democracy in the governance of our Church His focus today is possibly the gutsiest part of this Chapter. He looks at the reforms that the assembled wisdom of the Church's bishops sought to implement at the Second Vatican Council towards greater colleagiality and shared decision making. He also looks at the call for a different sort of relationship with the peoples of other faiths. <Click HERE to read Len Swidler's commentary>

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life or in our world!

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher