Sunday, July 20, 2008

Priest Bloggers

There have been a few stories floating around to the effect that bishops are looking to regulate the activity of priests in the blogosphere. I think the story broke on the Mulier Fortis blog. Fr Steven Fisher, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at this year`s Canon Law Society conference in Rome, has applied himself to producing a series of posts on this topic examining what canon law has to say. While it is certinly right that bishops should have the power to rein in a priest blogger if his blog is considered harmful to the faith or slanderous, it will be interesting to see what emerges. Fr Fisher makes the following useful point:
Realistically parish priests put more matters concerning faith and morals in their weekly newsletters. One could probably put an argument for requesting an imprimatur on every parish priest's column in his weekly newsletter (particularly if he makes it available to the whole world by putting it on the parish website...)

If all parish websites are to be regulated too then the diocesan censors are going to be very busy people!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sure no such censoring would be required with this blog. Alas one can see the need for some diocesan control on some other, particularly USA based/syle, blogs.

madame evangelista said...

I would second that - this blog is exemplary. You've obviously been longing (for goodness knows how many years) for freedom to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, but it hasn't turned you into an old scold!

Fr Michael Brown said...

Thanks for your votes of confidence. I think it would be hard to claim I`m attacking bishops on this blog. It`s more a case of being enthusiastic for Benedict XVI. if some people are less enthusiastic they may feel that there is implicit criticism if they are sensitive enough. Anyway no doubt we`ll here what is going to happen soon enough.

Mulier Fortis said...

The story was, indeed, a blogging scoop on my blog, so thanks for the link.