FROM CYBERSPACE TO CYBERGRACE:

Harnessing the Power of New Media in Aid of New

Evangelization

A presentation on the occasion of the 2nd National Conference in Catechesis and Religious

Education at De la Salle University, Manila, PHILIPPINES

27 April 2013by

Rev. Vitaliano S. Dimaranan, SDB, CAS, MTL, PhD

Introduction

I stand before you here, today, with no pretenses to

being an authority on the subject at hand. I have always

seen and styled myself since my younger days as a priest and

educator as a “pilgrim learner,” a “kalakbay at katoto.” In more

contemporary terms, made popular once again by no less than

Pope Francis, and his immediate predecessor, Pope emeritus,

Benedict XVI, I am a “pilgrim” on an ongoing journey of

faith and life, like everyone else both in and outside this

conference room.

I have basically a few questions, as much for myself,

as for you, today. They are not earthshaking and original,

as you might expect. They are as down-to-earth as questions

that have to do with most everything we do in life: 1). Why

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are we gathered here? 2). What is happening in the world? 3)

How are we to react, deal with, or otherwise, respond to

what we perceive is really going on? 4) What concrete

actions are we to take in the light of what is going on?

Touching Base with Reality

The first question is as elementary as it is important.

From where I stand, as a counselor, grappling with the truth

about oneself is a conditio-sine-qua-non of personal growth and

wellness. Very simply put, there is no growth until one has

faced the truth about oneself and accepted it for what it

is, not the way you’d like it to be.

So why are we here? For one who has been a priest and

educator over the past 30 years, I would like to put it

clearly. It may be a little too straightforward for comfort,

but I am sure you will eventually agree with me on this. The

truth stares us in the face, and only the one steeped in

denial would not agree. But the reality is this. “Houston, we

have a problem!” Fellow religious educators, we do have a

problem.

No, we do not have a problem with the message. The

product we push is the same all through the ages. It has

remained consistent all through the years, and despite the

media-inspired drive to apply pressure to the Vatican to

loosen up in terms of morals and doctrine, what the Church

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teaches now, and still will teach, is basically what she had

taught for centuries. But yes, we do have a problem with

method.

And yes … we also have a problem with the medium. Yet

another yes … We also do have a problem with man himself …

or the average young woman out there. In a world in rapid

“cultural decline” as Robert Spitzer (2000) puts it, “a

culture in desperate need of revitalization and even

healing,” (p.17) where the dynamic unholy triad of

sophistry, skepticism and cynicism rule the roost (Spitzer,

2011, p. 6), whatever message we sometimes so heroically try

to get across, is somehow “lost in translation,” or drowned

in a cacophony of other strident voices.

So, why are we here? I presume you are here because you

recognize there is a problem. But lest we end up clutching

at straws and biting off more than we can chew, let us do

the classical “delimitation” process. We are not here as

counselor-therapists, or psychologists and sociologists, so

ours is not the task to talk about the problem of “man” per

se. We are here as religious educators and evangelizers, and

no matter how much we might wish for our charges to be the

perfect, ready, willing and open recipients of our message,

they are what they are – products of their times, and

contextualized in a culture that simply does not seem to

make it any easier for us who are in the business of being

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basically “counter-cultural,” engaged in the work of

extolling the primacy of the spiritual and the ultimate,

over the material and the contingent. Our job today, is not

to talk about post-modern man’s seeming incapacity to

transcend the tyranny of moral relativism, materialism, and

hedonism.

Whatever conditions there are, right now, we have our

work cut out for us – to preach the Gospel in season and out

of season, to become, like St. Paul, and be “all things to

all, in the hope of saving some of them.” (1 Cor 9:22)

Still, our first question demands an answer. Why are we

here? OK, so the first batter is out: man and the issue of

message. But in the diamond ball field called life, with our

team of evangelizers raring to do a home run, we need to get

our method and medium up to the task at hand. In this game

of hard ball, we cannot afford to have three strike-outs. We

need to hone up our skills, and coax both method and medium

to go along with the stringent demands posed by our

opponents.

This is why we are here. But for us to do a home run,

we need to check out the batters. We need to touch base with

reality involving both method and medium. We need to ask a

second question: What is happening in the world as we know it? What is

going on? And this, I would like to suggest, is what I see,

based on what recent teachings of the Church say.

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First, let us mention the immediately obvious and the

undeniable. The media profoundly shape the cultural

environment. “The formative influence of the media rivals

that of the school, the Church, and maybe even the home.”

(Benedict XVI, Message on the 41st World Day of

Communications, 20 May 2007). Even our very own Chris Tiu

(Tuazon, 2012, Foreword, loc. 60) understands as much and

wrote:

Our generation is built upon the media. Our minds, opinions and moral standards are shaped by what we see; celebrities wearing plunging tops and micro mini skirts; movies portraying illicit affairs, rampant sexual activity, and extreme violence pervade society incessantly – leading some of us to think that these things are perfectly acceptable. Whatever moral standard society once held seems to have vanished, andleft with it a relativistic morality built upon impulse and feeling.

Second, the way the media shape culture is not so much

the content as the medium. As Nicholas Carr (2010) puts it,

“in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the

medium itself in influencing how we think and act … If we

use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as

a society.” (loc. 116) “The media,” he writes further,

“aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff

of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”

(loc. 174)

Indeed, Brandon Vogt (2011) summarizes for us the

future (and present) negative trends found especially in the

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New Media: 1) the proliferation of pornography, 2) the

phenomenon of anonymity that breeds contempt, 3) the

shallower relationships between people, 4) the rise in

narcissism and pride, 5) the growing phenomenon of online

relativism, and 6) the difficulty in prayer and

contemplation. (pp.189ss) The correlation between social

media and narcissism is well-documented in the Net. As for

online relativism, one only needs to see the user-generated

content sites like Wikipedia to understand what it means. The

fact that it comes from the Hawaiian word “wiki-wiki” which

means “quick” should already forewarn us about the tenuous

character of what it contains. Carr (2010) confirms Vogt’s

last item in his list thus: “What the Net seems to be doing

is chipping away my capacity for concentration and

contemplation.” (loc. 174)

Carr writes that “when we go online, we enter an

environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and

distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” (loc. 1983)

He quotes Merzenich who wrote: “When culture drives changes

in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates different

brains.” (loc. 2040) Carr further reports that Gary Small

backs up Merzenich in saying that “the Net causes extensive

brain changes.” (loc. 2056)

All this is to say that the Net, like all human

progress, “offers new possibilities for good, but at the

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same time opens up the appalling possibilities for evil that

formerly did not exist” as Benedict XVI wrote in Spe Salvi,

Number 22 (42nd World Day of Communications, 4 May 2008, No.

3).

So, again, why are we here?

I go now to the meat of this presentation. I would like

to fill up the bases and aim for a home run. I would like to

call in the two remaining batters: “method and medium.”

One clear lesson of history is that the Church was

never one to run away from a good fight. In her history of

more than 2,000 years, the Church has always faced

challenges head-on. She has always dialogued with, and

engaged, culture in the delivery of her timeless teachings.

When, for example, philosophy was the run of the day, the

Church took that area of human science and made of it a

vehicle – a medium, if you will – of presenting the truths

of the faith. In fact, the seemingly abstruse distinction

between substance and accidents, matter and form in

metaphysics, became the medium by which the Church’s belief

in the real, sacramental presence of the Lord under the

species of bread and wine was taught – and understood

readily – by the people who were deeply steeped in the

classical, philosophical, culture of the times.

How Now, Brown Cow?

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Our two initial questions: “Why are we here,” and “What is

going on?” now lead us to the third: How are we going to react and

deal with the prevailing reality, which, according to Benedict XVI,

is “what the media recognize as real.” (ibid., No.1, quoted

in turn from Aetatis Novae, 4, Pontifical Council for Social

Communication).

Perhaps some piece of trivia can give us a clue here.

Back in 2001, cell phone novels became a craze in Japan.

They were mostly love stories written in the crisp, pithy

style of text messaging, but without complex plottings and

character development found in traditional novels (cf. Carr,

loc. 1807). The fact is that, according to Nirimitsu Onishi,

as quoted by Carr, young people just did not read works by

professional writers because their sentences were too

difficult to understand (loc. 1807). As to which one of them

caused what, is not the important point. The point is what I

will be getting to a bit later in the course of this talk.

Jack Myers (2012) makes a special case for the cohort

that he refers to as “internet pioneers” or those born

between 1991 and 1995. These young people, who comprise

about 95 % of college students now, are the truly online

generation, for whom news and information come 24/7. They

are veritable “media junkies.”(loc. 124-163) For this

generation, the internet is more than just an invention or

an innovation, but a “transformational catalyst that is

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differentiating the 21st century from all history before

it.” (loc. 203) These young people “don’t go online; their

online and offline worlds converge into one ‘always on’

reality. They are socializing almost all the time.” (loc.

286) This is the group that Benedict XVI called in 2009, as

the “digital generation.” He referred to “new digital

technologies” that “are bringing fundamental shifts in

patterns of communication and human relationships.” (43rd

World Day of Communications, 24 May 2009)

But this is the clincher. Myers quotes Paul Adams who

wrote: “We’re moving from a web primarily built around

content to a web primarily built around people.” (loc. 546)

This, too, was what Benedict XVI was referring to, when he

spoke about young people’s greater involvement in the public

digital forum that “helps to establish new forms of

interpersonal relations, influences self-awareness, and

therefore, inevitably poses questions not only of how to act

properly, but also the authenticity of one’s own being.”

“There is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and

not to give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial

public profile for oneself.” (45th World Day of

Communications, 5 June 2011) Again, I would like to get back

to this issue later.

Peaks and Pitfalls

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All the foregoing, and more besides, shows us one

important reality. The Net and the New Media associated with

it, are a force to reckon with, and are here to stay, and

need to be accepted, warts and all. This stark reality is

fraught with lights and shadows, negative trends as well as

positive potentials, peaks together with pitfalls. We listed

down earlier some of their negative future (and present)

trends. But at this juncture, I would like to focus on the

peaks, the positive trends, and potential values open to us

as religious educators and evangelizers.

Here are the peaks, according to Vogt (2011): 1) a

possible springtime of evangelization, 2) innovative faith

formation, 3) rise on Church dialogue, 4) fresh wave of

religious vocations, and 5) rediscovery of the common good.

(p. 198). All the messages of Pope emeritus Benedict XVI,

who saw the rapid rise of this “digital continent” as the

new “agora” of our times, are all cognizant of this

situation of peaks and pitfalls.

If one is to scan rapidly through all the messages for

World Day of Communications since 2006, one can readily see

that, the Church is very much “on board” and conversant with

the “signs of the times.” The Church, moreover, is not one

to walk away from every opportunity to “preach the Gospel in

season and out of season.” In 2006, he taught that the rise

in communication ought to be paralleled by growth in

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communion and cooperation. In 2007, acknowledging that

globalization and new media “shape the cultural

environment,” he called for a reciprocity in terms of

responsibility, from both sides: the end user and the

provider. In 2008, Benedict XVI wrote that the media are at

the crossroads between self-promotion and service. Again,

acknowledging its extraordinary potential, he also

recognized the rise of “unimaginable questions and

problems.” One of these problems is their power, “not simply

to represent reality, but to determine it” … even to the

point of “not disseminating information, but to “create”

events. The Pope emeritus cautions everyone involved to

“avoid becoming spokesmen for economic materialism and

ethical relativism,” to “contribute to making known the

truth about humanity, and defending it against those who

deny or destroy it.” In 2009, he was more specific, and

talked about “new technologies, new relationships” and the

need to “promote a culture of respect, dialogue, and

friendship.”

Grace: A Gift that Knows no Gates

Spadaro (2013) can help us here at this point. In his

recent book “Cybergrace,” he asks a rhetorical question: “Is

there space for spirituality in the technological world?”

Spadaro offers a resounding “Yes!” God’s grace, he in effect

says, knows no bounds, and is not subject to physical gates

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and borders. Cyberspace, he claims, mirrors our desire for

the divine. “Technology,” he further states, “is the

organization of matter according to a conscious human

design, and, therefore, belongs to man’s spiritual being.”

With Tom Beaudoin, whom he quotes, he believes that

cyberspace is not all that bad, come to think of it more

deeply. Cyberspace, according to Beaudoin,

represents the human desire for fullness that exceeds the self: presence, relationships, and knowledge. Cyberspace highlights our own finitude […] Yet, it also mirrors our desire for the infinite, the divine. Given the direction in which technology is moving, cyberspace seems increasingly omniscient and omnipresent, which may be what the obsession with speed is all about, theologically. To search for this fullness of presence, one that spans and unites the human and the Divine, is to operate in the fields of adivine-human experience in which spirituality and technology intersect. (loc. 45)

Seriously Now, What Ought We To Do?

We need to get down now to brass tacks … down from the

ivory tower of theory and mere abstractions. We started out

this morning with a frank admission that we are facing a

problematic situation, principally in terms of method and

medium. Let me enumerate them and explain each as briefly as

I can.

1. More of What Works

The trend started by Japan’s cellphone novels that we

have alluded to shows us the way. We priests, religious and

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lay religious educators have quite possibly, a basic

misunderstanding of the role of the Word, taken to mean

Sacred Scripture, in our ministry. I see it among many

teachers who are utterly confused about how to integrate

values with the secular subjects they are teaching. For a

great many teachers, integrating values is basically reduced

to interspersing Biblical passages, and being preachy off

and on in the course of their teaching. Devotion to the Word

is also reduced, many times, to being wordy. Many priests-

preachers are guilty of this, including me. I am sure you

know the kind … preaching that sounds more like a jet plane

taking off with a roar and a thunder, but quite unable to

make a landing, circling round and round the airport, but

never making a touchdown. My point is simply this. Less is

more. Long-winded sentences are stuff for conferences like

this, not for cyber-connection, and cyber- conversation,

that can be expected to effect evangelization. This is the

first in the list of two that I said I would get back for

more. I will allude to this issue yet one more time as we go

along.

Jack Myers’ definition of Internet pioneers can help us

practice the dictum “less is more.” Internet pioneers, he

says are “the small band of impatient, empowered, multi-

tasking, curious, confident, confused, sexually liberated,

sometimes binge-drinking and often fragile kids who were the

first to be born into the Internet Age.” (loc. 124)

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Impatient is their first name. Another more educated-

sounding term for this is, they have, very simply, a “narrow

attention span.” It all seems to me, that, the broader is

their bandwidth requirement, the narrower is their attention

span, ironically.

Choosy is their surname. Yaki-Mix, Buffet 101, Vikings, Unli rice,

Mang Inasal, crossover, Chic-Boy, and other buffet terminogies

reflect the seemingly endless variety there is in

cyberspace: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon,

Tumblr, Google Plus, Quepasa, WeeWorld, and Foursquare, in addition to

hundreds more specialized networks and virtual worlds.

Facebook communities, groups, and pages come to mind. If

Facebook were a country, it would be the third biggest

country in terms of population, according to Myers.

The Killer App Par Excellence!

Sky Danton, founder, at age 23, of Earthlink, according

to Myers (loc. 241) believes that “it’s not content that’s

at the core of new media; it’s communications. Being

connected to a network of friends is the killer app.”

Those of you who belong to traditional groups in

Churches and parishes all over the country should take

notice by now. So-called “mandated organizations” like AP

(Apostleship of Prayer), LOM (Legion of Mary), CWL (Catholic

Women’s League), HNS (Holy Name Society), etc. are all

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gasping for breath. They are now all old and greying. Hardly

any new recruits take the place of those who bow out of

active membership due to age and health concerns. No offense

meant, but both volunteer and paid catechists in the

parishes are most likely those who have not much else to do

at home, either being retired, or otherwise, those who did

not pursue professional careers ever in the first place.

Danton is right. It is not so much content that matters for

the young people, but connectivity. And connectivity, in

this case, does not mean “belonging” to a physical group of

“digital dinosaurs” with limited reach and limited means, but to

the world of “social networking.” The traditional, what

theologians used to call “locus” of evangelization has

shifted from the limited physical world, to a borderless

world, the world of cyberspace. Let us put it as bluntly as

we can. If you run a restaurant worthy of the name, and you

don’t have a website, or at the very least, a facebook page,

you are a cyber non-entity. No clout. No influence. Nothing.

You are a digital fossil.

Please do not get me wrong. I myself am a digital

immigrant. (cf. Prensky, 2001) I wasn’t born with a half-

eaten Apple in my mouth. Sometimes, in the company of more

digital savvy youngsters, the so-called digital natives, I am

more like a digital refugee. But I worked hard to become at

least a digital migrant. As one who understands both the staid,

traditional analog world of pen and paper, and the dizzying,

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confusing yet exhilarating instant world of digital gizmos

and gadgets, I would like now to act like bridge-maker

between them who are really “hi-tech” and us, migrants, who,

at best, are really “hi-touch” and offer some concrete

suggestions to fellow priests, preachers, religious

educators, and all those whom I would like now to refer to

as cyber evangelizers.

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

I would like to suggest a concrete doable task for

catechists and religious educators out there, and to their

pastors who are thinking of something to help them hone up

their skills and be more effective evangelizers. For the

most part, catechists who teach in both public and private

schools do their trade in either formal or informal

classroom, or classroom-like situations. I submit that they

all do a great – at times, even heroic – job! Kudos to all

of you! But the students they teach see them and hear them

only in the real world of chalks and blackboards and

classrooms, at most, for an hour or so each week. By the

time these students get home, or, as is most likely the

case, to the nearest internet café, they move into a world

where their catechists or teachers are never present. Where

the kids are doing real-time chats, their teachers are lost

in the world of e-mailing, which is now as ancient and

foreign to them as snail mail. Forget about the TV. Young

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people now don’t watch that much TV. But they are online all

the time. For these members of “generation Y,” the virtual

has become the de facto everyday reality. This is where they

get their actual learning. This is where they imbibe their

values – or disvalues – for that matter. And so I ask: what

does it take for pastors and parish priests, or school

principals, to give all their catechists basic social media

literacy? This is one more case of putting our money where

our mouths are, instead of endlessly ranting and raving over

the fact that students don’t seem motivated anymore to

learn.

Presence, Relationships, Knowledge

There is more to evangelizing than merely passing on

knowledge. In the Internet world, “knowledge” is not first

in the list, but “presence.” Presence does not necessarily

mean you have thousands of “likes” on your wall post. In

fact, real popularity has become blurred by the phenomena of

“celebutantes” and “cewebrities” (Myers, loc. 2346).

Celebutantes are “popular” in the Net, but not necessarily

so in real life. For some, their video or meme, or

“outlandish” behavior have made their video or post go

viral, as Moymoy Palaboy once did. Cewebrities, on the other

hand, are those who achieve fame among the Internet

generation solely through a presence in the internet. Rarely

are they actually famous, but often wildly popular on sites

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like YouTube or Twitter, as Myers puts it (loc. 2385).

Fellow priests, religious, preachers, teachers, catechists,

religious educators: you may have lots of great ideas, and

you may be a genius, or even be considered a rock star by

your students, but if you are not present in the web, you

simply don’t make waves.

Spamming, Jamming, Meme-ing

Spamming used to be a curse in cyberspace. It still is.

Jamming radio frequencies used to be a headache for the

military during the Marcos years. Satire and biting humor

also used to be the main course in every anti-Marcos

gathering at that time. In fact, during those years,

especially after the death of Ninoy Aquino, the “street

drama or theater” became a vehicle of protest de rigueur, and

it capitalized on biting humor and sarcasm – a genre that

took a high point with characters like Congressman Manhik

Manaog, during the latter part of the ‘80s. Now it is

cultural jamming – a tactic used by anti-establishmentarians

to disrupt or subvert corporations and cultural

institutions, again, through subtly biting humor. It

basically “entails transforming mass media and advertising

to produce ironic or satirical commentary.” (Myers, loc.

2667) Its main tool? … the internet meme, which Lance

Bennett defined as “condensed images that stimulate visual,

verbal, musical or behavioral associations that people can

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easily imitate and transmit to others.” (cf. Myers, loc.

2667)

In case you failed to notice, this is what that

quintessential celebutante, (who will not be named here),

l’enfant terrible of Philippine tourism, showbiz wannabes or has-

beens, or his fanatic supporters (who have their own

agenda), used for maximum social media exposure … The “Padre

Damaso” character or despicable trait, never mind if it was

nothing but a distorted caricature of the original Jose

Rizal character of old, stuck in the hearts and minds of the

internet generation. The end result should not be difficult

to guess – a lot of hatred and ill-feeling against the

Church and her hordes of hyprocritical “Damasos.” The

picture was not worth a thousand words. It was worth a

thousand “shares” – a half-truth itself hypocritically

masquerading as “taking the moral high ground” and becoming

accepted as dogma by a generation who live in what Carr

called “the shallows.” In one fell swoop, via a single blow

to the jugular through a meme, people who hated the

intolerance of the Church with her ancient dogmas, just

proclaimed for the world (who did not see the irony) their

own bigotry and intolerance. Another example of the power of

sound bytes and digital creations is this. The “Pajero

Bishops” … a story that, by virtue of being artificially

made to go “viral,” courtesy of cooperative jukebox

journalists, and subservient networks, turned out to be

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“truth” for many who live in the shallows, never mind if

they have been disproven in the Senate. But by then, the

story was relegated to the back pages of the usually

strident media.

Prior to the death of Steve Jobs, mainstream media was

already awash in Apple media blitz. But especially after his

death, Apple upped the ante even more, and his speech

delivered at Stanford University some years earlier became

viral in YouTube and other social networking sites. The

world of saint-making that was sort of patented by the Roman

Catholic Church was hacked by this digital blitzkrieg.

Spadaro (2013) says that secular spirituality, sort of broke

into this system, and “changed its rules, views, and

internal logic as it [searched] for meaning to its

questions,” (loc.279), and “canonized” Steve Jobs. He became

the latest “secular saint” raised to the glories of the

altar of commerce, with his own quotable quote that became

viral, too: “Stay hungry!”

Take it or leave it … the meme is a force to reckon

with, and a force that evangelizers like you and me, can

tame and claim as our own. Many did of late. I can vouch for

its effectivity. Being very active in social media, I saw

for myself how some of my critics in Facebook, eventually

were slowly tamed by the many pro-Church memes that found

their way on my wall. You have no choice. The rule of the

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game is, as is commonly said by you in the academe, “Publish

or Perish!” Join the league or be relegated to the digital

cemetery. Master them. Use them. And please produce more of

them!

2. Fides Ex Auditu: What Do We Make of Romans 10:16?

I love pop music, as I do classical music. I got more

than 6,000 “songs” in my iPod. Most times, when I work, like

when I write (which is most of the time), I keep them

playing in the background. Most of you are “worse off” than

me in this regard. The headphone has become one essential

gadget you cannot do without. Back in the day, if you wanted

to hear some music, you went through a ritual. You choose an

album from the rack. You take out the long playing record

from the carton-cover, gingerly take the record out of the

plastic protective sheet, put it on a record player, and

again ever so carefully put the “needle” on the groove. Your

focus was to listen, with all your heart and your mind, and

you do nothing else but listen – actively. You savor the

listening moment. Now, most of you hear – on shuffle mode,

that is, without really actively listening. You hear, but

don’t necessarily listen to music playing in the background.

According to Spadaro (2013) “listening is no longer

primarily an activity, but the launch of a soundtrack to

everything we do.” “We don’t listen anymore,” he says. “We

do things and what we do has music playing in the

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background” (loc. 103). “Listening creates an environment

rather than communicating a message” (loc. 114).

Fellow priests, preachers, catechists, religious

educators, the thing to ask ourselves is this: what sort of

soundtrack keeps on playing in the background of our lives?

I have met priests who begin conversations with godly

themes, and almost always end up talking about business.

Business is the soundtrack of their lives. I have met people

who begin conversing with you, asking you how things are

going on in your life, until they start with the magic

syllable “I” and the rest is really an ego-tripping

monologue. Similarly, I have met individuals who keep on

hogging the conversation, and before you know it, even

without you asking, he or she has told you all about his

perceived or alleged personal achievements. Their soundtrack

is nothing but themselves, and mind you, they don’t want it

to merely play in the background! The challenge is precisely

this: How can we make the Gospel good news the soundtrack of

people’s lives?

3. Innovate or Vegetate

Scot Landry presents an interesting “adoption curve”

when it comes to embracing New Media. He says that 2 percent

are innovators; 14 percent are early adopters, 34 percent

are in the early majority, 34 percent are in the late

majority, and 16 percent are laggards. (cf. Vogt, p. 112ss).

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I still see a lot of laggards in Metro Manila. One tell-tale

sign? They still use transparencies and an ancient OHP to

project songs for Mass! I don’t know where to place the

Catholic Church as a whole in the Philippines, but I

definitely am not in the mood of placing many dioceses and

parishes in the 14 percent early adopters. If we go by how

they implement the “reform of the reform” of the liturgy

started by Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, then, it is “business

as usual.” We have a few lackluster TV programs to boast of,

but the INC can boast of 3 television channels, not two-hour

programs!

I am not exactly a digital innovator, so I cannot be of

much help here. But I would like to think of myself as an

early adopter. I am a keen observer of the world of

business, especially restaurants that mushroom on and off in

the volatile world of trying to please the Filipino palate.

I have predicted the early demise of some start-up

restaurants, and I foresaw that certain restos that were

popular once upon a time, would no longer be among the major

players in the country. Why, you might ask? Simple. They

were fossilized in their inability to adapt and adopt. They

were caught in a time warp. They failed to innovate, like

some successful new players did – and still do. “Houston, we

have a problem.” Our religious education is caught in a time

warp. It’s either innovate or vegetate. It’s as simple as

that!

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4. Saturation Is the Name of the Game

Within two hours of Pope Francis’ election to the See

of Peter, pundits and so-called Vaticanistas, including our

very own homestyled experts of the three warring network

giants, burned the wires and were tripping all over

themselves trying to get the latest scoop on the new Pope.

Bloggers from both sides, the so-called “trendies” and

“traddies” were all revved up trying to look for signs about

his being too traditional or too modernist. The traddies

were obviously smarting, right from the moment he stepped

out of the main loggia. Quelle horreur! He was not wearing the

mozzeta, and on the sole basis of that, traddy bloggers kept

on writing about something that the Pope actually never even

said, but was lifted from a comment of one sore Italian

reader to a blog that whined about the “modernist” Pope.

In the meantime, my facebook wall or PM box was getting

quite a few interesting queries. Was Pope Benedict XVI

really the anti-Christ? Those questions echoed an earlier

time when people asked me whether Pope Benedict really

allowed the use of condoms, and other preposterous

questions. Where do you think did those questions come from

and what engendered those questions?

My answer is this, and this leads me to the last

suggestion that I would like everyone to remember. The cause

and reason are basic and simple … the Net was saturated by

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those bloggers and haters. Facebook was saturated by people

who lived in the “shallows,” and who were caught flat-footed

in their not-so-blissful ignorance. Thomas Peters says there

are three essential things that “New Media activists” ought

to have: faith, unity, and numbers. (cf. Vogt, p.162ss) The

first is obvious. Nemo dat quod non habet. You can’t give what

you don’t have. The second is pretty obvious, too. A house

divided against itself won’t stand for long, as the Lord

Himself reminded us. If we trendies and traddies keep on

tearing one another and canceling each other out, we can’t

win over those who are honestly searching for God.

The third is my last and most important point. “It’s

the numbers, stupid!” Haters and naysayers are all over the

Net. Various anti-Church lobbyists, who go by such big and

fancy names, who have big web sites, who are omnipresent in

the Web, appear like they have such huge constituencies, and

behave like bees that swarm all over us, giving the false

impression they are many and powerful, even if in reality,

they are but a handful of digital loud-mouths who hog the

digital continent.

They get by with the semblance of “numbers” and show of

strength. At some point in my Facebook adventure, I had my

share of these haters who kept on dropping bombshells of

hate and anti-Church memes, or personal attacks against me.

I did not fight them head-on. I just kept on posting short

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statuses that answered indirectly all their vociferous

rants. I was helped in no small measure by “friends,” who

were on my side. They did the same, flooding my wall, and

theirs, with Catholic memes. It worked. It still does. I

don’t know whether it was because they got tired of posting

things that I simply ignored, or whether they were really

converted, but for at least a number of them, I could

honestly say, the latter possibility was the case. Let me

quote Peters at this juncture:

“It is impossible for the world to ignore a large,

passionate, unified group of believers. We may be a

minority, but that does not mean we are inconsequential and

few. Instead, it means each and everyone of us needs to

participate.” (Vogt, p. 165)

Per Agrum ad Sacrum: Life as a Pilgrimage of Faith

I go back where I began – my self-styled image as

“kalakbay at katoto,” a pilgrim learner. Every pilgrimage is

a journey from point A to point B. But reaching point B does

not end the journey. It begins a new one and the cycle goes

on and on, until we reach the full stature of Christ. A

person in journey is a person in progress, whose position is

not that of a status comprehensoris, but a status viatoris – the

state of being a pilgrim in perpetual journey, not that of

one who has arrived! (cf. Pieper, 1963, pp. 89ss) We go

through the rough terrains of life’s daily realities – like

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the uncertainties brought about by a connected, conversing,

communicating world of cyberspace. The pilgrim of old (whose

root word is agrum, which means “fields”) had to endure

going past the challenges of these rough terrain, in the

hope of reaching the sacrum, the sacred, the holy.

Cyberspace is not a finished product. It is rapidly

evolving, and giving the Church both problems and

exhilarating possibilities. I could not agree more with

Spadaro who looks more at the peaks, rather than the

pitfalls of cyberspace. We cannot afford to do less. We are

called to contribute towards creating a desired future, and

go through this pilgrimage of faith together with the rest

of the world, and turn cyberspace into an opportunity for

cybergrace, and make use of what it offers to do our own

brand of cyber evangelization. “Woe to me if I do not evangelize!” (1

Cor 9:16)

References:

Barron, Robert (2011). “The Virtual Areopagus: Digital Dialogue with the Unchurched” in Vogt, Brandon (2011) (Ed). The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor.

Benedict XVI (2006-2013) Messages for the World Day of Communications. Retrieved from http:www.vatican.va

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Carr, Nicholas (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Fulwiler, Jennifer (2011). “Into the Light: Sharing the Spiritual Journey” in Vogt, Brandon (2011). The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor.

Landry, Scot (2011). “Innovative Shepherding: New Media in the Diocese,” in Vogt, Brandon (2011). The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor.

Myers, Jack (2012). Hooked Up: A New Generation’s Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World. Stanford, CT: York House Press.

Peters, Thomas (2011). “Changing the World: New Media Activism,” in Vogt, Brandon (Ed). The Church and New Media:Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor.

Pieper, J. (1963). Faith, hope, love. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Prensky, Marc (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol 9, No. 5) October 2001.

Spadaro, Antonio (2013) Cybergrace, Fortykey Books.Spitzer, Robert J. (2000). Healing the Culture: A Commonsense

Philosophy of Happiness, Freedom and the Life Issues. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Spitzer, Robert J. (2011). Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Tuazon, Oliver M. (2012). No Holds Barred: Questions Young People Ask. Manila: Cobrin Publishing.

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