Head of Catholic Church in UK criticizes online communities

And the UK Tech Herald isn't at all happy to hear it:

Breaking with its well-established tradition of remaining respectfully quiet on subjects that reach beyond the Bible, the good old Catholic Church has this week weighed in with its opinions on social networking. Surprisingly, the Church isn’t a fan and probably won’t be delivering bite-sized sermons on Twitter any time soon.

More pointedly, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has said social networking destinations such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo place a focus on forging potentially delicate “transient relationships” that can cause suicidal tendencies when and if they fracture.

The Church also said social networks place far too much emphasis and importance on how many friends a user can amass as opposed to the actual quality of any resulting friendships.

The criticism of social networking, which was offered up by Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols in UK broadsheet The Sunday Telegraph, comes following the suicide of 15-year-old high school student Megan Gillan, who took a fatal overdose of painkillers after being bullied online through Bebo.

The UK Tech Herald makes the (I think somewhat jerky move) of recommending readers join their Twitter and Facebook groups. Disagreeing with the criticism is one thing, but trying to be sneaky about promoting the opposite of what you think the Archbishop is recommending is not a very mature response.

I think Archbishop Nichols has the right sense here - clearly technology can be used for good and bad purposes, and like any tool, must be used prudently. But the tone one uses to criticize these matters is important - and it's also important to be fairly-well informed about the technologies one is criticizing. Other catholics - lay and ordained - have of course embraced technology to do good things online, and goodness knows the internet benefits from our active presence!

My simple rule of thumb is that our online activity should serve our "real" life. If we're spending time on Facebook catching up on what our faraway friends are doing, instead of spending time with the ones who are actual neighbors, that could be a problem, and an imbalance we need to address.

So we should both take the good things that people see in online communities, and the sober advice of our ecclesiastical shepherds, and make an informed judgement call. 

You know, like we should do with anything else (when we have legitimate options).