Evangelization in an age of Doom Scrolling
Constant access to the latest Roman scuttlebutt or curial gossip draws our attention away from the parts of the Church where we actually live.
The advent of smartphones and social media has been, at the risk of understatement, something of a mixed blessing.
It turns out that drinking from a firehose of news, images, and information — very often dubious or even sinister information — is not something to which the human soul is very well suited.
We naturally like to know, to be informed, to have our curiosity both piqued and satisfied. But many of us are simply unable to keep up with the flood of information available to us now that we have the entire internet in the palm of our hands.
Those of us who grew up in the Before Times — before the internet, before social media, before smartphones — had the advantage of first encountering these technological marvels as (more or less) mature adults.
It is hard enough for oldies like me to use the doom portals in our pockets responsibly and with moderation. A large and growing swath of the population today doesn’t remember a world without that particular technology.
For many of us, the internet is the primary means by which we interact with the world “out there.” Hopefully, most of us spend most of our time face to face with real people–our families, neighbors, coworkers, etc. But when it comes to getting news about, say, what’s going on in the Church beyond our own parish, much of what we read, hear, or see comes through the internet.
There are tremendous advantages to having all this information at our fingertips, provided one can find a reliable source of such news. But there are also distinct disadvantages.
For one, having constant access to the latest Roman scuttlebutt or curial gossip tends to draw our attention away from the parts of the Church where we actually live: our own parishes and dioceses. And, let’s be honest, our interest in what’s going on elsewhere in the Church isn’t always wholesome.