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rahansen's avatar

Another fascinating nugget about Church operations, not written about elsewhere - thanks!

(You two should write a book at some point about your professional experience reporting on the Church. All the President's Men probably contains one tenth the drama of deep-dive reporting on Church goings-on. A movie deal no doubt awaits, the only question is: which actors get cast for your parts? I'll leave that as an open question for your readers. ;)

Seriously though, I found this excerpt about possibly reforming pontifical secrets intriguing: "...designed with consideration for the flow of information in a digital age." It raises (among a few others) the question: Do we want Church operations to be designed for modern "flow of information" at all? I'm not sure I do - I kind of like following the edicts of an organization that considers a century to be a short term time period, and the information age to be a recent novelty. There are frustrations in this, to be sure, but overall probably many fewer than following a group that blows in the prevailing societal winds (consider Congress, for example). Also, and this would be a deal-breaker: I would not bet my eternal salvation on an outfit if, say, their bishops made regular appearances on CNN (or Fox, or etc) as part of their expected duties.

I would rather the Church err on the side of opaqueness, and leisurely decision-making. Those who cannot trust the good faith of decision-makers must ask themselves why they also entrust the shepherding of their souls to those same clerics.

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Bridget's avatar

"unless they are compelled to do so by public outcry."

So what I'm hearing is that there should be more public outcry, and of the compelling sort (not the most efficient way of doing things and probably not pleasant on the receiving end but moral cowardice is to some extent its own reward.)

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