Courtney McGrail“Hell hath no fury like a Catholic scorned on Twitter,” as someone once remarked, and there’s no getting away from the fact that the Catholic internet can sometimes seem like a strange and overheated place. It’s perhaps not surprising that it can become unbearable when collective discernment exercises like the synod cause excitable commentators to run innumerable articles declaring that the end of the Church is nigh, as though the Gates of Hell were – despite Our Lord’s promises – about to prevail against the Church.
Online panic, which has gone so far as to see at least one website organising a petition begging synod fathers to “publicly retire from any further participation in the synod before its conclusion so as to prevent greater scandal and confusion”, doesn’t exactly present the Church in the best possible light. Still, it’s worth remembering that there’s more to the Church’s presence in what Pope Benedict called “the sixth continent” than enraged bloggers and excitable journalists.
Among the sites that any Catholic can usefully visit online is evangelizo.org, which acts as a resource offering everyone the daily Mass readings in a range of languages, notably English at dailygospel.org and Irish at soiscealanlae.org
Sketches
Allowing readers to choose between the older calendar for the Extraordinary form at peripsum.org/M/Tra as well as the standard Roman calendar, it contains links to biographical sketches of the saint of any given day and commentaries by important Church figures on the day’s readings, and offers a useful facility that allows readers to look a couple of weeks ahead to future readings or look back to readings in the recent past.
Even more functional in appearance, and just as useful in its way, is universalis.com, which features not merely the Mass readings of any given day, but also the full Divine Office; for those who like to join in the Prayer of the Church each day using a ‘Morning and Evening Prayer’ book, Universalis can supplement things very effectively through including Midday Prayer and the Office of Readings, for example. It’s even got a facility whereby you can arrange to have the Office emailed directly to you on a daily basis.
The only problem with the site, really, is that it uses its own translations, which can be rather stilted.
For those using smartphones, though, the Universalis app is far cheaper and more convenient than buying even a ‘Morning and Evening Prayer’ book, never mind a three-volume set of the complete Daily Office. It uses the Grail translation, the standard modern English-language version when praying the Psalms in community, along with the Jerusalem Bible, as used at Mass, for other scriptural readings.
Some sites have been in place so long they’re all too easy to take for granted. NewAdvent.org, for instance, includes the invaluable text of the old Catholic Encyclopaedia – published in 1917, and outdated in some ways, but timeless in others, St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, and a Bible where Msgr Ronald Knox’s elegant modern English translation is flanked by the original Greek and the Vulgate Latin texts.
Though valuable, given that even Knox wrote before the Second Vatican Council and that other features of New Advent’s site are rather older, it’s well worth keeping up on where the Church has gone since then.
It may seem too obvious to mention, but w2.vatican.va, though cumbersome, is a treasure trove on conciliar documents, papal pronouncements, and even weekly homilies. You’ll find the Catechism of the Catholic Church there too, along with the Compendium of the Catechism and the Code of Canon Law.
Most of us could do with boosting our knowledge of what the Church teaches and why – for all its failings, the internet is a superb toolbox for helping us be better Catholics.