Thinking about online temptations: Maybe Catholics should log off now and then?

If you know anything about religion and social-media, you know that Catholic Twitter can be a wild place.

Niche digital religion is really something. I mean, if Elon Musk decided to swim the Tiber, all of the Big Tech servers would probably turn to pillars of salt. If he became an evangelical Protestant this White House might resort to nuclear weapons.

The question many Catholic priests, and other mainstream religious folks, have asked is rather basic: Is something like Twitter a good, safe, worthy place to invest their talents? Or should they consider it a dangerous waste of time?

I’ve read some interesting essays on topics related to this question and, this time, I will share one as this weekend’s think piece. The headline at RealClearReligion.org is rather blunt: “Catholics, Log Off.” The author is Jack Butler, an editor at National Review Online and a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University in America.

Let’s start with the obvious: What would Satan tweet?

The fight against Lucifer was going pretty well — until the devilish enginery appeared. As John Milton depicts the battle of Satan's rebellious angels against the forces of Heaven in his epic poem "Paradise Lost," the demons were on the backfoot, until they devise "implements of mischief" that will "dash/To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands/Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd/The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt."
Not all artifices are inherently evil. But if the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is true and demons "prowl about the world, seeking the ruin of souls," they can show up in our devices, too. William Peter Blatty suggests this in his novel "The Exorcist." The demon Pazuzu, having possessed a young girl, is asked if it minds being recorded. "Not at all," the demon says. "Read your Milton and you'll see that I like infernal engines. They block out all those damned silly messages from him."
But what does it mean for technology to obstruct our path to God?

To put this in small-o “orthodox” theological terms, technology is merely another development in a world that is both glorious and fallen.

Writing the story of the Belgian dockworkers was like eating sand.

Once upon a time he’d persuaded himself that technical facility was its own reward: a sentence singing hymns to the attainment of coal production norms in the Donets Basin was, nonetheless, a sentence, and could be well rendered. It was the writer’s responsibility in a progressive society to inform and uplift the toiling masses.”

-- Dark Star by Alan Furst (1991)

I have my favorites. Writers whose work I turn to for enjoyment, inspiration and to steal phrases. The American spy-thriller novelist Alan Furst is a craftsman and storyteller whose work with each re-reading offers different insights into the human experience. It is fun, too.

The passage above from Dark Star illuminates the mental processes of reporting. For every exclusive or breaking story, for every fascinating glimpse or profound discussion of life, God, or the world -- come hundreds of other pieces reporting on committee meetings, speeches and conventions. The eating sand imagery is quite real to me, as is the sense of pride and pleasure of mastering a craft.

Technical ability -- things such as cleverness of language or an edgy tone -- are welcome but cannot make a story great. For an article to break free from the pack of mind numbing junk that overwhelms journalism, the writer must have technical facility but also a sense of the background to the subject. Knowing why the story matters moves it beyond being merely amusing.

The Times story of Nov. 17, 2017, entitled: “Revised Lord’s Prayer delivers French from confusion” is technically proficient, but dull. The author recites but he does not report.

The lede states:

God will no longer be asked to do the Devil’s work in a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer that has been adopted by the French Catholic Church.