Fr. Longenecker was kind enough to ask me to write a guest post on his blog “Standing on my Head” dealing with humor. You can read it here.
Many people are probably aware of the social media service “foursquare”, for those not in the know Wikipedia says:
Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users “check in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.[3] Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges”.
Now I have never used this service since even rocks call me sedentary in my ways. When I am not working in front of a computer monitor, I am likely to be behind a book and so my check-in history would be rather repetitive and extremely boring.
This social networking service does make me wish for a different type of service that would be more useful than letting your friends know what store or restaurant you are currently are visiting.
What I would like to see a service called;
But of course with a logo that doesn’t suck.
Now I would envision prayersquare as the place to check-in with your private and liturgical prayers. You could then follow the prayer activity of fellow members of the body of Christ and have events such as:
- Praying the Sorrowful mysteries.
- Attending daily Mass.
- Reading the Office of Reading in the Liturgy of the Hours.
- Praying for the repose of the soul of my loved ones.
- Prayerfully preparing for the Sacrament of Confession.
- Praying before the Blessed Sacrament.
Though this would have to be social networking with a twist. Your prayersquare account would have to be totally anonymous to discourage people bragging about how pious they are. Not much point in bragging like the Pharisees about how much they contributed to the Temple. Seeing the prayer activity of others would help encourage people to join in and pray themselves.
I can also envision some cutting edge technological integration to make checking in of prayer easier.
- Mobile phone Liturgy of the Hours apps such as iBreviary and Unversalis could have prayersquare integration and as you read through the various hours it posts your prayer check-in.
- Wi-Fi enabled and touch sensitive Rosaries could check in after a decade or a set of mysteries.
- Location aware phone apps could check you in when you go to your parish.
- Logos bible software integration.
- Phone personal assistant applications like Siri could detect prayer ejaculations and check them in. Though it would have to have a “Jesus prayer” filter so as not to check-in every utterance of this prayer so as to not clog up the prayersquare timeline.
Like foursquare there could also be achievements. For example:
- Volunteered for 3 AM adoration in the Blessed Sacrament chapel.
- Found a priest giving confession out of the hours of 5 to 5:30 PM on Saturday.
- Graduated from the purgative way to the illuminative way.
- Found a spiritual directory that doesn’t believe in that anonymous Christian crap.
- Read the Catechism in a Year via flocknote.
- Actually “prayed attention” during Mass.
Now if the the person is experiencing the Dark Night of the Social Media, than all achievements are taken away and the person comes to rely totally on God and not badges, achievements, and other forms of point scoring.
Now I am not so sure of Mayorship where a user has checked-in to a prayer event on more days than anyone else in the past 60 day. Or maybe it is the term “Mayorship” that doesn’t apply and is jus too prideful. Really maybe the term “Servant” applies since “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”
Now of course this post is firmly tongue-in-cheek, but really I wish a service like this existed.
Via Ed Peters:
Cardinal Tim Dolan just delivered an excellent address to the USCCB. It needs to be read, and even listened to, in its entirety. Here I’ll underscore just one of his points: “The work of our Conference during the coming year includes reflections on re-embracing Friday as a particular day of penance, including the possible re-institution of abstinence on all Fridays of the year, not just during Lent” (my emphasis).
For what it’s worth, I unequivocally endorse the re-institution of Friday abstinence in the US. This decision lies quite within the authority of the USCCB (see 1983 CIC 455, and 1249-1253) and, among other things, would render moot, once and for all, nagging questions about whether the episcopal conference ever really got around to substituting “other forms of penance” for abstinence from meat back in 1966, or 1983/1984, or whenever.
Still I can hear it now: “Okay, Peters, if you’re so gung-ho in Friday abstinence, do you abstain from meat on Fridays now, and even if you do, why should it be made a law for everybody?” Fair enough.
First, I don’t abstain on most Fridays now. Most times I simply forget; moreover, I’m pretty good at talking myself out of inconvenient observances if they are largely personal. I need the directives toward goods (like penance) and away from evils (like presumption) that law by its very nature offers. Second, abstaining from meat on Fridays would not be to introduce a new rule, but rather, to eliminate a variance on or exception to the common (and ancient*) rule of abstinence that is already set out in canon law, above. Third, the corporate example of all Catholics engaging in some sort of common religious exercise outside of Sunday morning is, I think, desperately needed in a world that wants to relegate religious observances to a six-hour window once a week.
Ex labiis Cardinalis Dolan ad aures episcoporum nostrorum!
If the bishops of the England and Wales could reinstate Friday Abstinence than we certainly can. Maybe we could have a piety war with England and see which country could out piety the other.
On the personal side to answer the same question Mr. Peter’s answered, my selected Friday penance is to fast by only eating one meal on Friday’s. I would gladly (if forced) mix that with mandatory abstinence and for me eating fish is a bit of a penance.
The previous action of the predecessor of the USCCB not to specify a form of penances has meant that hardly anybody choose to perform any penance at all. I think this was a serious mistake and followed up by another mistake. It is one thing not to specify the penance, it is quite another to put no effort into educating Catholics that they “must perform an alternative penance.” Ask a Catholic what form of penance they are performing on Fridays and it is almost guaranteed that you will get a blank stare instead of an answer.
I know fasting on Friday’s really helps me to focus more on Good Friday and the reasons I need a savior in the first place. I must admit though that I really like the “Solemnity Loophole” where when a Solemnity occurs on Friday you should not be doing any penance. People have learned the “Solemnity Loophole” when the Feast of St. Joseph occurs on Fridays during Lent and this gives you something to look forward to throughout the year. Food tastes extra good on Solemnities. Some people might take on an extra penance of eating a Fish Filet sandwich at McDonalds.
So I guess I will be ironically fasting and praying for a return of Friday Abstinence.
Here is a nice overview of some of the proposed changes to the Divine Office put forward during the semi-annual meeting of the USCCB.
Now since I am already using the Revised Grail Psalms for the Liturgy of the Hours via an iPad app it won’t be too major of a change for me. Regardless I hope they do address the “Glory Be.” I have heard questions about the “World without end” many many times on Catholic radio so I would certainly like to see a better translation of “In saecula saeculorum.”
This is the 37th volume of The Weekly Benedict ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Benedict. This volume covers material released during the last week for 12 October, 2012 – 9 November 2012.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 37 – ePub (supports most readers)
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 37 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Benedict eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
One of the things that can be quite maddening after an election is the stories about the Catholic vote and how it is used to show approval of a pro-abortion politician. Specifically in the case of President Obama. In 2008 this pro-abortion politician “Catholic vote” contingent was 54% and this time it is “51%”.
To which faithful Catholics always want a breakout of a least weekly Mass going Catholics. In 2008 this statistic turned out to be 43%, better but not exactly a figure to want to should from the rooftops. It is easy to want to blame the media and pollsters for not being more specific as to what constitutes a Catholic voter.
For example I was raised in a liberal family in a very blue state and identified myself as liberal, though I have left my liberal faith. If they used the same metric they used for Catholics concerning me I would be part of the “Liberal vote.”
Maybe that isn’t the perfect parallel since if a pollster asked me if I was liberal I would not confirm it in the context of the modern sense of the word. Apparently Catholics who have stopped practicing their faith do self-identify as Catholic. Somehow I don’t think they are making the ontological distinction of having been baptized into the faith. Being Catholic becomes more like a group identity, a cultural backdrop, something you disagree with but maintain some tenuous connection.
Really though can we expect pollsters to make distinctions between Catholics who attend Mass weekly or not? Somebody might be a faithful Protestant and whether or not they attend services weekly might have little bearing on that. So expecting pollsters to make distinctions like this is asking too much.
Besides as many have noted their is no monolithic Catholic vote. The party they are affiliated with is usually going to tell you much more than what church they are affiliated with. Mostly instead of the yeast permeating the leaven the leaven is permeating the yeast.
Maybe the positive news is that people are still willing to identify themselves as Catholics at all even if they currently have little connection with the faith. Considering the long lent of the priestly sexual abuse scandal and the relentlessly negative assault on the Church by the media this is a bit of a silver lining. Sucessful programs like “Catholics Come Home” certainly remind us that we should not be dismissive of this group of Catholics as being seen just as something annoying that messes up polling statistics. We can laugh about “Christmas & Easter” Catholics and the other labels we have seen, but evangelizing them is certainly harder than the quick joke.
After election analysis can be interesting, but when it comes from the same people who got the pre-election analysis wrong it should be taken with many grains of salt. After election reactions can also be rather elitist. I know it is easy to want to disparage those who voted against a supported candidate in a “How dare you” tone. Political junkies kind of expect everybody else to be political junkies.
Still I was trying to understand the dynamics of this election and was not really finding a key to understanding it. I was listening to Al Kresta and he said something that kind of provided that key of understanding to me. That President Obama has become a cultural icon and the election turned more on this than an endorsement of his politics. There are several seemingly incongruent facts that then make more sense when seen in this light. Being a cultural icon and a pop culture president you become more immune from nasty facts such as the state of the economy. Scandals that might have overturned one president can be endured with this status. We heard again and again how his election in 2008 was a “historic event” as if all historical events are not historical events. The fact that as a leader he was rather dangerously inept did not matter as much considering he was such a part of the culture visiting cable and TV shows, appearing on a radio show with the “Pimp with the Limp”, opining about personal conflicts on American Idol, schmoozing with the Hollywood elite and others from the entertainment industry.
President Clinton was a bit of a pop culture President appearing on Arsenio Hall’s show and other cultural interactions. But President Obama has been the master of this and transcending the act to a whole new level. He was most comfortable and engaged with the pop culture. Really having to do his job as President always seemed like a nuisance to him. People call the Affordable Care Act Obamacare, but he was not the driving force behind it. It was Rep. Nancy Pelosi who did the heavy lifting and getting the Democrats in line to vote for it. Sure the President helped out concerning a couple of wrinkles at the end like writing a worthless executive order to soothe the conscience of Bart Stupak. Actually meeting with legislators to hammer out a budget was just too much work. He created a jobs council and then didn’t meet with it. If he spent as much time thinking about the economy as he did working out the NCAA brackets it might have been interesting. If we ever needing an Ambassador to Hollywood surely he is the person to fill that job.
As a cultural icon he seemed to see his job as being cool and relating to young people and he mostly achieved that. Sure that is an overly broad generalization, but I think there is some truth in it. Pop culture icons can be forgiven much and don’t have to be tied to promises and a record with little to brag about. When the Nobel Prize committee gave him the Nobel Peace Prize at the very start of his administration they contributed to the cultural iconification where the idea of him was more important than the facts of him. This election fundamentally has not been much different where the idea of him still triumphs. Sure there is not an insignificant number of people who are with him all the way politically, but that he not what earned him another four years. It seems many people still went out to vote for him mainly to feel good about themselves than to feel good about the direction of the country as some exit polling seemed to show.
What I think this means for the future is not that social conservatism and conservative ideas are dead on arrival as far as the culture is concerned. The confluence of events that created the pop culture president is not going to be the defining truth for elections to come. This was more personality than politically driven. The answer certainly is not for conservatives to try to imitate the pop culture aspect of his success – they never will, but they certainly have a long way to go to engage the youth and others. In some ways President Reagan also became a pop culture phenomenon on his own terms with his extolling of conservative ideas along with a sense of humor broke through to a generation that other conservatives would have written off. Romney was not effective engaging the new media and didn’t even spend money on ads at, for example, Hulu. President Obama has been all over the old and new media including sites such as Reddit. Certainly there are the younger generation of conservatives that are using the new media and maybe the next candidate will learn a thing or two from them.
Brandon Vogt has a good post up on “7 Things Bishops Should Know About Catholic Bloggers”
One of them included this:
5. Digital imprimaturs are not a good idea.
One of the big questions in the Catholic blogosphere concerns authority. In an online world that is by nature egalitarian, how can bishops speak with any unique authority? Similarly, how can Catholics be sure that a website they visit faithfully and authoritatively presents Catholic teaching?
As you know, the answer is easy when it comes to print. Your censor gives it anihil obstat, you give it an imprimatur, and people can be confident it contains no theological errors.
But what about blogs and websites? Should we institute some form of digital imprimatur?
I don’t think so. I’m convinced it’s a bad idea for three main reasons:First, blogs and websites are constantly changing. If you grant an imprimatur to a specific website, there’s no guarantee its content would remain orthodox.
Second, validating tens of thousands of Catholic sites and millions of new articles each year would be a futile effort.
Third, as Matt Warner points out, blogs are not libraries of digitized books. They are virtual conversations. They’re more like pubs and living rooms than soapboxes or encyclicals. We would never put an imprimatur on a bar stool or living room couch, nor should we propose one for blogs.
When I was a guest on Catholic Answers Live this was one of the questions I got. The caller wanted a sure way to tell if a blog was faithful to the Church and wanted blog imprimaturs. As I recalled I told him first to study your faith — the Catechism, spiritual classics, and other documents. Those who are experts in detecting counterfeit money become experts by becoming thoroughly familiar with real money not studying counterfeits. As you learn more about the faith it becomes easier to detect when any writer or speaker is speaking accurately about the faith. As I was coming into the Church reading Church documents and the spiritual classics it helped my theological spidey sense to detect dodgy writers.
My second suggestion was when you find a blog that you like and is faithful to the Church you can look at their blogroll for suggestions regarding other faithful blogs. These blogrolls more often than not are a semi-impramatur and a good indicator. The opposite is true of more dissident blogs where almost always they link to other dissident blogs. When I found my first Catholic blog over a decade ago I immediately found other good Catholic blogs from the blogroll and then from the blogroll of these other blogs. It was a little easier then since there were not all that many Catholic blogs and really no dissident blogs at that time. In fact I remember Commonweal doing some coming whining about the lack of progressive blogs.
Jimmy Akin on his podcast previously answered this question regarding the Canon Law aspects regarding blogs, podcasts, and other public posting. Here is the transcript.
So there is a new a new Archbishop of Canterbury – Rt. Rev. Justin Welby. Really being the Archbishop of Canterbury should be one of the Dirty Jobs that Mike Rowe tries out. This job is like striding across a fault line during an earthquake with two sides continuing in opposition and trying to maintain balance.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker has his analysis which is quite interesting.
We will soon hear concession speeches from the economy, the unborn and religious liberty.
— ➡️Curt Jester⬅️ (@CurtJester) November 7, 2012
I am pleased to have inspired the Ironic Catholic in actually writing a concession speech for religious liberty..