Does the Internet strengthen or weaken the church and the message?
Actually the title of this post came from the Catholic Herald and should have read Is the Internet weakening the Catholic Church?
As it happens – and as I’ve noted previously – Pope Benedict is particularly media savvy, especially with regard to the digital universe. This doesn’t stop with the Pope however and an example can be found today in the National Catholic Register, lamenting the Catholic Church’s current status in the “search engine wars”:
The good news is that the Catholic Church has the answers they are looking for. The bad news is that search engines, like Google.com, don’t entirely know it yet. That’s our fault.
For instance, if I type “What do Christians believe?” into google.com, there is not one Catholic result returned in the top ten. A few are Catholic friendly (some not), but none explicitly and accurately represent the Catholic perspective.
Now, that is admittedly because we often use “Catholic” instead of “Christian” in our online material. But is that what the average person types in when searching?
The article cites the apparent deficiencies with ‘Catholic’ search engine results and concludes:
Anyway, google results are not the end-all be-all. But they are pretty important these days. We have so much great Catholic content online. We just need to polish it up a bit and get it formatted, presented and shared in a way that those searching for it will easily find it. And especially when there are so many other distractions out there doing a better job of it than us.
Improving this one aspect of our evangelization efforts really could have a much bigger impact than I think we realize.
They are of course correct and I’ve noted in the past the Vatican’s commitment to meet the challenge of a new digital age head on.
Today the Vatican meeting of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications concluded, as reported by the Catholic News Service and here’s some excerpts of the article with a few passing comments from me:
Pope Benedict said that while new media can help spread information, often it is focused on attention-grabbing images and makes little or no attempt to help people understand what is happening or what it means for their lives.
How true, in fact there is a website set up with the single purpose of highlighting and combating poor ‘god beat’ journalism. This article is a prime example analysing journalistic coverage of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church in the US.
The Westboro Baptist Church is a sad example of a fundamentalist extremist group garnering disproportionate media attention. I’ve oft noted the fact the more nuanced, reasonable and intelligent you are, the less attention you receive, but that’s another story and of course another temptation to resist.
[.....]
But the Catholic journalists, mostly laypeople, also tried to drive home to the church officials a need to recognize how communications works in the Internet age. The World Wide Web isn’t simply an electronic slate where a newspaper can be posted instead of being printed.
The Internet, and especially blogs and social media such as Facebook have created a new style of communications that is interactive, something most institutional church efforts — from homilies to the Vatican website — have never encouraged.
The Catholic bloggers, newspaper editors and website operators at the conference said people today — especially those under 35 — expect to be able to pose questions, replies and comments. The Catholic Church clearly wants to draw people into parish life and encourage them to share their faith with others, but opening even a tiny comment box on an “official” church website is still seen as too risky.
It’s not that caution and control aren’t smart, several participants said.
Anna Arco, a blogger and editor at the Catholic Herald in England, described the Catholic blogosphere as “lively, loud and argumentative.” She said some Catholic blogs have been ignorant, hurtful and aggressive, but generally when the bloggers are taken seriously as communicators who have something to say in the church, they tend to grow more responsible in what they publish and in the tone they use.
People have turned to blogs because they have not been heard, because their concerns are not being listened to or even taken seriously,” she said.
Jesus Colina, director of Zenit news, said the “original sin” of Catholic communications efforts is that they are designed to speak to the faithful, but not to listen to them.
In addition, he said, while the church claims a unique expertise in creating community, Catholic media tend to give voice only to the bishop and a few priests.
Not much to add to this except to say I agree. To be brutally honest some Christian forums can degenerate into snake pits and not because of the atheists! Enough said.
The Internet is here to stay and if we have an important message then presumably we need to embrace it and as the Catholic News Service aptly concludes:
“There are risks involved” in opening channels for interactive Internet content, she said, “but the great risk is that we don’t engage” with Catholics who don’t read Catholic newspapers or with the wider public.
I just want to note that there are many marvelous examples of Christians online. There are the hundreds of Church and Christian blogs which I follow and I must mention the Biblioblogs – Jim’s doing rather well in the search engines 
– with their focus on all things theological and academic.
Anglicans are not being left behind with blogging Bishops and the fairly new Twurch of England amongst other initiatives.
All in all we’re not doing bad, but I feel there could be improvement in terms of mutual online support, but that’s my own little gripe.
The message of Christ must ring out loud and clear online and it is a marvelous opportunity, however, the Internet can also be an unforgiving and merciless environment when it comes to scandal, opposition, and exposure of in-fighting and disunity.
Anyway, back to the original question, does the Internet strengthen or weaken the church and the message? A related question is does going publicly online with our faith serve to strengthen or weaken us personally?
Tags: Christianity, Church Life, Internet & Technology, Media, Religion Society
October 8th, 2010 at 9:51 am
I don’t know whether this is a help or not (probably a help, ultimately, as it will force some people to think about what they’re doing), but as you say, Christian forums can degenerate into snake pits, and that’s been my experience with most of the ones I’ve been involved with.
I think there’s nothing better than letting the world see us as we really are, with all the power that Internet anonymity allows us when we get to take the masks off. If that’s not appealing, then we need to get our act together and sharpish. The constant denunciations over minor doctrinal issues, the attitudes that, when expressed, come across as hateful to the very people we are trying to reach – all of this needs to go.