Bulletin Column from October 17, 2021

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:
Praised be Jesus Christ! For over twenty years now I have maintained a paid, regular subscription to the New York Times, at first in its print form and now in its electronic form. As time has passed it has grown increasingly frustrating to pay (a lot of money) for a paper with a news bias so divergent from my own views, yet I just can’t seem to give it up. I think part of the reason is because I know that its perspective is that of a sizeable portion of the broader culture meaning I would be foolish to not be aware of it. Similarly, perhaps skimming the Times each day is my small way of trying to fight against our growing modern tendency to only gain information from sources with which we agree.
Information gathering has now become a consumer-oriented and individualistic endeavor at a level that is unique in world history. Until very recently, it was the case that villages, regions, and even entire nations gained their news from only a couple of common mouthpieces. Our current cultural bias is to view that prior reality as a limitation that we have fortunately now overcome. We quickly think only of the bias of the old information systems, and how prone they apparently were to control and manipulation, believing instead that now we are much better off being able to dial-in to whatever personal information mouthpiece we have decided is “trustworthy.”
While there are merits to our current, personal consumer-oriented information gathering habits, the major downside is the total fragmentation of the human community in ways that we are only now beginning to grasp. Where before we could count on the people we passed on the street to be on a similar page with us because like-minded people generally live in big groups, now it is no longer a guarantee. Community is no longer defined by physical geography or boundaries. It is defined “virtually” meaning that even in a physical unit as small as one household there can exist vastly divergent worldviews all enabled by the fact that each inhabitant has their own, personal access to the digital world of information that is shaping those divergent worldviews.
Deeply divisive conflicts are no longer between nations, with one group on one side of the map line fighting the opponents on the other side of the map line. Now these kinds of deep conflicts are between “neighbors.”
To offer a more concrete illustration, consider what it did to American cohesiveness, unity, and identity to have to rely on only three networks to give us the news: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Part of the reason why everyone knows where they were when they found out about President Kennedy being shot wasn’t only because of the shattering of our age of innocence. It was because everyone heard it from Walter Cronkite at the exact same time. Literally one mouth piece in that moment created one nation.
Unfortunately, the same fragmented dynamic about news gathering has crept into the Church, and it is perhaps the single greatest threat to Catholic unity that we have faced in ages. Parishes have generally been cohesive entities, especially when grouped by ethnicity, if for no other reason than that everyone coming in the door on Sunday all lived in the same neighborhood. These days parishes are less cohesive, although they still tend toward consistency of mindset better than many non-virtual entities do. However, the reason for this likely has more to do with the organic grouping that slowly materializes around the common voice of the pastor, as some folks join and some folks leave following the voices they like, than it has to do with anything truly Catholic.
Yet, even that is not quite right. The fact is that for all the threats to fragmentation inside and outside of the Church that I am describing, which are real, the Catholic Church still remains a remarkably resistant entity to this dynamic. This is because we have sacraments and because we are all nourished by the common Word of God. The Holy Spirit is the active agent of our unity. For as fragmented as our sources of information are sometimes even within the Church herself, with all the divisions that come with it, our sacramental and Scriptural bonds are still extremely strong.
All this by way of saying that we are probably all better off if we pay some attention to more than one, favorite news mouthpiece, Catholic or secular. And, we are so fortunate to be Catholic, and to belong to a family of faith that crosses all boundaries like nothing else can. Here in the Church we find the antidote and the healing remedy for our fractured world. In the Church we encounter Christ together, and in him we are made one.