Tuesday, December 14, 2004
THE DIZZYING ARRAY OF "CATHOLICISM" ON THE WEB
some in communion with the Pope, some not even sure what denomination they belong to. A lot of these websites claim to be "traditional". It's hard to imagine anything less traditionally Catholic than being out of communion with the Pope. The word "tradition" is losing its meaning not only in Guenonian Traditionalism, but also here.
There is a problem with the web that is becoming more apparent all the time. In real life we can look at a church or a diocese and judge by its size, its appearance, the people who are attached to it whether it is to be taken seriously or not. In cyberspace, all websites are created equal and remain equal. The markers that help us make a judgment call are all missing.
Charles Upton discusses this phenomenon in _The System of the Antichrist_:
The internet is the perfect socio-technological symbol of postmodernism. There is no 'over-arching paradigm' to give order and coherence to the view of reality it presents...the Web represents not an objective reality, either material or metaphysical, but rather a mass subjectivity with objective consequences. (p. 50)
I don't agree with everything Upton says about the web, but that insight is very perceptive, and the above-linked website of "Catholic" churches is a good example of it.
