Catholica Editor, Brian Coyne, responds to Tom McMahon's reflection on Catholica and some of our recent commentaries [LINK].

A response to Tom McMahon...

Tom, thank you for your critique and appreciation for what we're trying to do with Catholica. I confess I am feeling tired. Keeping up this sort of output for four years — Edition 1468 today — has been energy sapping. I think it is an important discussion albeit one that is virtually unwinnable in the present institutional culture and structure. When we started I was far more optimistic for the institution. Today I sense it has to collapse. It has become largely irrelevant to the challenges facing humanity and seems basically only oriented to serving the needs of a small minority of the baptised. Our world is in deep flux at the moment. The calls on our global compassion and generosity with the floods in Pakistan, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the bushfires in Moscow, not to mention the growing global problem of refugees and displaced people are leading to an exhaustion amongst those with the capacity to help.

See the program overview at: www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/ dicksmithspop.htm Watch video preview: www.abc.net.au/tv/watchnow/ ?item=9&pid=player

In Australia last night one of our major public figures, Dick Smith (a man who made his fortune selling electronic components by mail order and who built a retail empire of Dick Smith Electronics stores across this nation — now owned by Woolworths), has triggered a major debate in the midst of our federal election campaign on the questions of Population Growth, Sustainable use of the world's non-renewable resources, and questioning the connection between Capitalism and its relentless necessity for growth. [LINK] It's a massive debate and I fully expect it will be a global debate before too long. It raises deep moral and ethical questions to do with the very future of humankind. The tragedy, to my mind, is that institutional Catholicism largely wrote itself out of having any voice in this discussion decades ago.

I cannot believe how quickly the debate has moved in recent months. Benedict had a massive opportunity to make the Church relevant again in his much anticipated Pastoral Letter to the People of Ireland on March 21st. As expected, what he had to say was transmitted around the world in hours and had a massive impact in the media. But he blew the opportunity comprehensively — see the latest reports coming in from Ireland just in the hour or so I've been writing this: "Terry Prone in www.herald.ie: Vatican are either so arrogant they don't care about reaction of the faithful, or totally ignorant about how mass media works" and "John Cooney in www.independent.ie: Storm as Pope lets bishops keep jobs". I can't believe how much the global conversation has "moved on" in just the last few weeks while Benedict has been on holidays. I think the man is going to emerge into a totally new milieu when he makes his visit to Great Britain in a few weeks time. I sincerely doubt that Benedict will even notice so "cut off" from the world has he now become.

The technological challenges...

Last night I was doing some study on the internet of the new advances taking shape in communication technologies. (There is a big debate raging here between the two contending parties about the roll out of a National Broadband Network which has the potential to deliver fibre optic and satellite connection to 97% of the Australian population at speeds up to a gigabyte a second — 10 times the speeds we have at the moment.) I wasn't so much studying the communication channels but the developments in software and hardware that will be hitting our desks and lounge rooms in the next few years. We're in the midst of a revolution more incredible than the revolution of the motor car, the telephone, the invention of photography, talking movies and high fidelity recording, and humankind's first journey into space all rolled into one. When I started Catholica I was reasonably on top of all the software, and how most of the hardware worked. I find, four years later and all this intense concentration on doing the layout for commentaries each day, that I am now a long way behind. The technology and software we're using for Catholica in a very short space of time is going to look like the steam engine in an age of modern jet engines.

It's not just the technology though. Twitter is in danger of turning humankind into "venting zombies". Ian Elmer's commentary yesterday I see as one of the most profound and insightful of any that we have yet published on Catholica. Society is caught in a contest today between this minority who want everything to be "simple" and those who seek real answers amidst the complexity of Creation. It's "blind faith" against those, like your namesake and mine, St Thomas who appreciated the importance of doubt and uncertainty. It's a contest between the fundamentalists and the rest of society.

As I keep arguing, even though the fundamentalists might be small in number, they are driven by forces in the human psyche that are more powerful than any other force known to humankind. We have an institutional Church, in fact most institutional religions today, are on the side of the fundamentalists not on the side of the great majorities. The disease even affects our political parties. In the contest going on in Australia at the moment, we're not really searching for a political party that will respond to the needs of the 80 or 90% of the population. The contest is essentially about trying to garner the support of the 10% of fundamentalists who want "simple answers" — the talk-back rat pack of society, those with concentration spans about as long as the 140 characters of a Twitter message, the audience Rupert Murdoch has built a global media empire in "stirring up" for the entertainment of everyone else.

If God had been able to condense his message down into a 140 character Twitter message I am sure he would have done so rather than bequeathing to us the 774,746 words in the Bible. Life is complex. Discussions such as this one Dick Smith has started require lengthy and intelligent reflection by a lot of people before we can reach a consensus that galvanizes national and international policy initiatives. (Just yesterday in the press we saw a story out of China of one of the Generals advocating that China had to abandon communism and embrace the freedoms embraced in capitalism [LINK: "China must reform or die"]. There is a massive shift going on in China at the moment that will take decades to resolve. The massive population of China telescopes the debate going on there into the global debate about the sustainable future of our planet.) I honestly don't believe human society can conduct these sort of discussions on Twitter and Facebook. We also need the sort of sustained conversations that we've been trying to encourage here on Catholica albeit that one of the limitations we face is that there are simply not enough minutes in each day for readers to keep up with all the conversations.

Discerning the future for Catholica...

I confess Milly and myself are scared at the moment. From the outset we have seen Catholica as being dependent on "the grace of God" and the hope that somehow the resources would flow to us that made it sustainable. The harsh reality is that the pair of us have been living below the poverty line — we're not the only ones by the way. I could name half a dozen prominent contributors to Catholica who have also been living below the poverty line for as long as Amanda and myself. Recently here in Australia an initiative in the secular sphere similar to ours, New Matilda, had to close because of the lack of capital and income. They had a heck of a lot bigger readership than ourselves — up in the range where I've been aiming to get to. These matters are weighing heavily on our minds at the moment. Dick Smith partly funded the documentary shown on national television tonight and has committed a further one million dollars personally to furthering the debate on sustainability and population. Building an audience is expensive. Anybody can set up a blog these days but "building a mass audience" that actually reads it, and does something through reading it, is another exercise altogether. I knew from the outset that the financial challenge we faced with Catholica would be huge. We can't offer indulgences and "passports to paradise" as the bishops can to the likes of Opus Dei members and these so-called New Movements so favoured by JPII. The audience we are seeking to reach have "left the Church" and will take considerable persuasion to support an initiative such as ours. Like yourself, Tom, in a very real sense my commitment to this endeavour has been my version of "A Letter for My Children". One day I can only hope they might be interested enough to read it all — or at least try and work out the central thrust of what I was getting at, or searching for. Bishops and popes don't have children. I don't think they have any way of understanding what you and I speak about when we talk about writing "letters for our children".

I am acutely conscious that the rapid changes in technology will force a significant change before too long in how we present Catholica. We were "up with it all" when we started Catholica but my perusal of the large media sites such as Fairfax Digital, the ABC and the BBC make me conscious that my own skills need constant upgrading. Alternatively we need to employ a significant workforce to keep ourselves "in the race" if our endeavour is to be something more than some "personal indulgence" or, like many of the other blogs out there, speaking to tiny audiences.

We owe an enormous debt to all of our lead commentators. Many people can write. To write in a way that attracts a significant audience is another talent altogether. The "success" so far of Catholica — and the comparative statistics that I publish from time to time demonstrate that our success is nothing to be sneezed at, and more so in that we've done it all on the proverbial "smell of an oily rag" is something we can all take considerable comfort from.

IMAGE CREDITS:
The images used in this commentary have been sourced from the websites they are linked to.

Brian Coyne, 13 Aug 2010

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©2010Brian Coyne

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