RJ Stove asks, “Should Catholics blog?” noting three ethical potholes on the blogospheric highway:
i. Addiction, with all its dangers;
ii. Pseudonymity, with all its dangers;
iii. Encouraging smart-aleck soundbites rather than hard, detailed, historically scrupulous reasoning;
iv. Related to (iii), a general degrading of language, and of the writers role as languages custodian (not to say as breadwinner);
v. De facto anticlericalism.
For instance:
The Internets capacity for creating addicts is something that even the stupidest Panglossian social worker no longer attempts to deny. Every conscientious priest is aware of it; many a priest worries about it; some priests actually issue warnings to their flock about it. More priests should do so.
Etc.
But “many a priest worries about it”? Hell, most of them don’t know what it is or look on it with — shall we say — clerical condescension. For one thing, blogging has built into an interactivity that’s not in many priests’ vocabulary either.
Nonetheless, Stove has a good examination-of-conscience checklist here.
Blithe Spirit 
Many thanks, Mr. Bowman, for your kind words.
It is worth pointing out that the piece in question was written back in 2006, and that in certain respects my crystal ball proved to be cloudy. There were several subsequent, and relevant, phenomena that I – like, to my knowledge, everyone else – failed to predict.
(a) I failed to predict the Global Financial Crisis, with its implications for publishing anywhere.
(b) I failed to predict the extent to which serious print magazines, after 2006, would either close down altogether (e.g. The Independent Australian) or, more often, go exclusively online (Australia’s National Observer, America’s Crisis) or, still more often, cut contributors’ payments to the bone (no names, no pack-drill). These occurrences obviously have implications concerning the survival – indeed the continued possibility – of that professional authorship ethic which I championed in opposition to the widespread “write what you feel, baby” blog culture.
(c) I failed to predict in 2006 how utterly, obscenely hopeless the mass media (whether Catholic or secular) would be in dealing with today’s Catholic sex abuse scandals. The secular mass media concentrated, true to form, on peddling incompetent lies; the Catholic mass media (particularly the bulletins of two Australian archiepiscopates, Melbourne and Perth) simply snubbed, when they did not calumniate, any orthodox Catholic layman who tried to warn them. We owe it to such blogosphere adornments as Rorate Caeli that the loathsome Maciel’s reputation was eventually demolished, and that the canonization – I almost wrote “deification” – of John Paul II has been indefinitely stalled. This uncomfortable truth I must now admit.
(d) I failed to predict the all too frequent dumbing-down of those intellectual magazines which, thus far, have financially and physically survived the recession. If anyone in 2006 had told me that The New Criterion would subsequently publish hagiographies of Andrew Roberts and Christopher Hitchens (both of whom bear much the same relation to factual thinking that Jackson Pollock did to painting), I would have assumed that the prediction was an unreconstructed Stalinist’s witless April Fools’ Day joke.
Furthermore I would have been equally skeptical if anyone in 2006 had told me that Australia’s Keith Windschuttle, within a year of becoming Quadrant editor, would (i) defend plagiarism (“There are very few cases where plagiarism should be a sacking offence for a university teacher”: Quadrant, May 1988); (ii) fall victim to a “science” hoax so obvious and childish that it should not have deceived a kindergartner; and (iii) combine untiring paeans to the free market with ever more imperious demands for taxpayers’ money. Such behavior suggests, on Mr. Windschuttle’s part, ideation not far removed from a death-wish. As the son of a suicide, I might perhaps be forgiven for having had a bellyful of other people’s death-wishes; but if Mr. Windschuttle’s current idea of intellectual activism is to imitate the Bud Cort character in Harold and Maude, that strange hobby is, I suppose, his intellectual prerogative.
Do I think I was always right in what I wrote in 2006? Later events force me to give the answer: “No”. Do I, therefore, regret what I wrote then? Also “No”. However inadequately, I did cleave to the notion of Catholic truth.
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