Invited or not, here we come

It happened between the rosy celebrations of Laetare Sunday and the renewed purple solemnity of Judica Sunday. My husband sent me the news of a meeting to be held in Rome by the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications. The meeting will be open to 150 bloggers, and any blogger is free to apply. It will be held on the afternoon of May 2, the day after the May 1 beatification of John Paul II.

Being a Catholic blogger, I knew this already.

Every morning, I turn on my computer, check my e-mail accounts and do a quick survey of my favourite Catholic blogs. As these are not “official” Catholic blogs, perhaps I should call them “Catholics’ blogs.” The most popular blogs are rarely “official” Catholic blogs. They are usually written by ordinary priests and laypeople.

For years now, Catholic bloggers have sponsored polls and gathered statistics to determine the most popular English-language Catholic bloggers. They are not bishops or the heads of Catholic TV stations. They are Fr. Zuhldorf of What Does the Prayer Really Say?, Rocco Palma of Whispers in the Loggia and Mark Shea of Catholic and Enjoying It. They include Damian Thompson, chief of England’s the Telegraph blogs, and Kat Fernandez, single mother and writer of The Crescat. They include a nun known only as Sr. Mary Martha, writer of Ask Sr. Mary Martha. They tend to be American. Sixty per cent of the readers of my Seraphic Singles blog are Americans.

The universality of the Pontifical Commission’s “blog meet” invitation surprised me and many other bloggers, members of  “the Catholic blogosphere.” We read the blog polls and the statistics, so although many of us long to be chosen ourselves, and applied for invitations straight away, we wonder about the selection process.

There are thousands of Catholics blogs. How on earth, in three weeks, will the PCCS read all the applications, let alone judge the blogs? And will they invite those bloggers we ourselves vote the most representative of Catholics’ blogs? Or will the guests be limited to those who, how shall I put this, know clerical insiders? Being invited to a bloggers’ meeting simply because you know clerical insiders goes entirely against the populist spirit of the Catholic blogosphere.

The Internet is the greatest communication and social revolution since Gutenberg built his first printing press circa 1440. Publishing is no longer limited to the few or the well-connected. Catholics whose books, articles and letters are not published, sometimes for reasons having more to do with politics than lack of skill, have turned to the Internet, both to find Catholics who share their concerns and to express their hitherto unpublished thoughts. As this sort of thing touched off the Protestant Reformation 600 years ago, the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications is right to take an interest in bloggers.

But when you read the most popular Catholic blogs, you do not find Protestant revolt. You find enthusiastic support of Catholic doctrine. You find the official Latin prayers of both the Ordinary and Extraordinary forms of the Mass translated painstakingly into literal English and compared to the ICEL translations of yesterday and today. You find stories of Catholic martyrs old, like St. Edmund Campion, and new, like Shahbaz Bhatti. You find links to fascinating Vatican documents, old ones we once bought in yellow pamphlet form from the Catholic Truth Society, and the new ones, like Summorum Pontificum, of which you may never have heard. You find requests for prayers. You find traditional names for the Sundays of Lent. It’s enough to make you ponder that Marshall McLuhan — the man who predicted the Internet — was, in fact, a devout Roman Catholic.

Catholic bloggers get a bad rap, and it is true that some are not delightfully polite. Some are angry, but the pastoral genius is not the priest who shouts “How DARE you be angry?” but the priest who asks “Why are you angry?” and listens.  Fr. Zuhldorf is one of the latter; no wonder his blog is so popular.

Meanwhile, another important Catholic blog meeting is in the works.

Blogger and journalist Hilary White has announced “The Other Rome Blognic” for May 3, 2011. She isn’t judging applications. She is frankly sending out invitations to English-speaking Catholic bloggers, particularly to those whom Catholic bloggers themselves have deemed the most popular and influential. One of the topics to be discussed is “Why is the Catholic blogosphere so nearly uniformly ‘conservative,’ pro-Benedict (XVI) and, above all, young?”

And so the Catholic blogosphere buzzes again. And although Hilary assures me that I could be considered “conservative” only if compared to Fr. Charles Curran, I have been invited.

A round-trip ticket from Edinburgh is £60. It’s spring. It’s Rome. It’s a chance to meet fellow Catholic bloggers. How could I resist?