~ Glen Butterworth, SJ reflects on whether the pope really needs another website

When I was younger (so much younger than today), I used to find papal encyclicals by browsing through library stacks. Somewhere in the middle of the row would be a shelf half filled with almost pamphlet-thin volumes. There were always twice as many copies of Pacem in terris than anything else and so I guessed that it was, or had been at one point, more important to more people than any other encyclical. I remember picking up a copy and flipping through it but then reshuffling it back into the deck of similarly titled works. I was then, as I am now, more drawn to rarity than ubiquity.

(I do the same thing in Blockbuster Video. There are entire walls covered with the same DVD but I will inevitably choose an obscure foreign title, for no other reason than my general aversion to what is popular.)

When it comes to locating papal documents online, it’s already a breeze to type vatican.va into my favorite – if less popular – search engine and then rapidly navigate to where the encyclicals and other documents live, just behind the first ‘coin’ labeled papal archives. Additionally, I’m registered to receive the Vatican Information Service daily email bulletins in my mailbox; hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about what’s being thought of and prayed over in Rome.

There’s a process at work here that began with my seeking out the truth some years ago and where I am now, receiving this stream of information that connects me to the Church.

I suppose my question about whether the pope really needs a new web presence has more to do with where – or how – I am phenomenologically in the world, owing, I imagine, to my experiences. What’s different today from when I was young and first seeking out the truth is that there used to be no concept that mass communications could be two-way – or even multi-directional. Feedback was a function of statistical analysis, the Nielsen ratings for television and circulation for print materials. That is certainly not the case today. The web is meant to be interactive.

Indeed, the internet was never intended to be merely a broadcast medium. That is, from the very first days of the web, when a privileged few at a small number of American universities were loosely connected, it was all about sharing information – collaboration without regard for physical location.

One of the great challenges of this new internet age we’re in is that the web doesn’t reflect nature in its disregard for location. (“Location” isn’t just important for restaurateurs.) Location and context provide the outward conditions for inner dimensionality and hence for growth and development in an environment. There is complexification in the web, both in design and evolutionary computation, and yet despite our projections there is no there there.

In a word, it’s flat.

The web itself is lifeless, if helpful, but the Church is a living and growing body. And as such, its actions and its message will always be out there on the edge of our current human development – out beyond what we already are toward what we are becoming.

So while I may be content at this stage of my life to receive a steady stream of Vatican information – and be perfectly comfortable with how I go about locating existent resources, my experience as a thirty-something cradle-Catholic American cannot be the measure of how the Church should proceed into the future. The Church, by its nature, must be cognizant of how the next generation will come to know about the content of the faith in the context of our environments.

Hope has something to do with our desire for the future and our expectation of getting there. There is a there out there. And the next generations of seekers will be looking on the web to find it, even if we’re fairly confident it’s not there. And it might not be, for us. But then we’re not here for ourselves, are we?

www.pope2you.net