Last month’s World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro had a new twist.
Making your way to this year’s World Youth Day granted you the usual benefits of completing a pilgrimage, but this year had a new twist.
The Vatican not only recognized those attending the event in Brazil as usual, they also included those who took part “with due devotion, via the new means of social communication.”
Some news headlines lead us to believe that “the Vatican was offering to get people out of purgatory sooner if they would just follow Pope Francis on Twitter.”
Not the case.
However, this is an interesting development as the Catholic church recognizes social media as an extension of involvement and participation.
Is it really participating?
Let’s step away from the theology of the Catholic faith and look at this from purely a religion/technology perspective—applying it to the Protestant faith:
What about those who attend church services every Sunday morning via a church video stream?
The example of World Youth Day is a one-time event, so I can see this isn’t exactly comparing apples and apples, but I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
[via Relevant]
Adam Shields says
If the two options were to not follow World Youth Day at all or to follow it via social media, then social media is better than nothing. I doubt anyone for an event like that seriously thought, “well I could travel to go to World Youth day or I could just live stream the video feed.”
Church is something different. It is more mundane and therefore easier to think, “I could drive to church or I could just live screen the video feed while eating breakfast and folding laundry”. Which could be a problem.
But if the option for the church is to video feed because it can include people that can’t come for one reason or another, or to not video stream because some people might watch the video feed instead of coming, then I think the answer is pretty clear that you should bias toward doing the feed on account of those that are actually well served by the feed. Anything can be abused, everything has an unintended consequence. But that doesn’t mean that we should not do good things because some bad uses.
Jimmy says
Well said.
Eric Dye says
As usual, you nail it. 😉