As the Vatican launched its own YouTube channel, the Pope tempered his embrace of new media with a contemplation on the meaning of friendship in an increasingly digital world. His thoughts were included in a letter that cautioned against the marginalization of offline relationships:

The concept of friendship has enjoyed a renewed prominence in the vocabulary of the new digital social networks that have emerged in the last few years. The concept is one of the noblest achievements of human culture. It is in and through our friendships that we grow and develop as humans. For this reason, true friendship has always been seen as one of the greatest goods any human person can experience. We should be careful, therefore, never to trivialize the concept or the experience of friendship. It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop on-line friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbours and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation. If the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may in fact function to isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development.

But while the Pope points out the spiritual shortcomings of cyberspace, he’s plugged in enough to recognize its potential to spread the gospel. He concludes his letter by encouraging young Catholics “to bring the witness of their faith to the digital world,” and, “to introduce into the culture of this new environment of communications and information technology the values on which you have built your lives.”

(Thanks, Articles of Faith.)

Buried in the Utne Reader library is nearly every issue of the sorely missed DoubleTake magazine. That’s where I stumbled across this letter from Walker Percy to Bruce Springsteen in 1989. When Springsteen finally responded, in 1993, it was to Percy’s widow. It’s a charming and intriguing correspondence that touches on the Catholicism and work of both men. DoubleTake ran the letters with a discussion between Springsteen and Percy’s nephew Will.

Here’s the exchange of letters:

Feb 23, 1989

Dear Mr. Springsteen—

This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, for your musicianship, and for being one of the few sane guys in your field.

The immediate occasion is that my favorite nephew, Will Percy, has even a higher opinion of you. He is a level-headed perceptive young lawyer and generally knows what he is talking about.

Of particular interest is from learning—from an article in America, the Jesuit weekly—that you are Catholic. If this is true, and I am too, it would appear that the two of us are rarities in our professions: you as a post-modern musician, I as a writer, a novelist and philosopher. That—and your admiration for Flannery O’Connor. She was a dear friend of mine, though she was a much more heroic Catholic than I. The whole time I knew her, she was dying of Lupus Erythematosus, a fatal and extremely unpleasant disease. A prime example of her faith: she was participating in a seminar with some modish ex-Catholics like Mary McCarthy. Mary, thinking to be generous toward the church, said something like: “Well, it is true, some of the Catholic rituals, like the Eucharist, are good symbols.” To which Flannery, who hadn’t said a word, responded with a single sentence: “I say that it it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” You will recognize Flannery’s tone.

This is to say only that I am most interested in your spiritual journey, and if there is any other material about it, I’d be obliged if you will tell me.

Unfortunately, I have cancer and am taking radiation for it. I am far from well and am not able yet to receive visitors.

Since I don’t know your address I am handing this to Will who says he knows where to send it.

All my best wishes for your superb career.

Sincerely,

Walker Percy

+ + +

2/8/97

Dear Mrs. Percy,

This is a letter so long in coming I’m almost embarrassed to write, but I’ve gotten to know Will a little bit and he’s encouraged me on, so here we go.

A few years back when I received Dr. Percy’s letter, I wasn’t very familiar with his work…my memory is that [his] leter was written on a yellow legal pad and, as is mine, his handwriting was not the easiest to decipher. It was a passionate letter about the comforts and difficulties of reconciling the inner life of a sophisticated man, a writer’s life, with the Catholic faith. I recall Dr. Percy’s explaining how one had brought depth and meaning to the other for him. He was curious to know how I handled my issues of faith….

It is now one of my great regrets that we didn’t get to correspond. A while after receiving Dr. Percy’s letter, I picked up “The Moviegoer,” its toughness and beauty have stayed with me. The loss and search for faith and meaning have been at the core of my own work for most of my adult life. I’d like to think that perhaps that is what Dr. Percy heard and was what moved him to write me. Those issues are still what motivate me to sit down, pick up my guitar and write. Today, I would have had a lot to put in that letter….

I hope this letter finds you well and that someday when I’m down in your neck of the woods or you’re up in mine we can meet. I’d love to have you come to a show, you might like it!

Best,

Bruce Springsteen

P.S. I’m in Australia at the moment and I’ve just begun “The Message in the Bottle.”

Image courtesy of German Federal Archives.

CatholicGoogle, which deems itself “the best way for good Catholics to surf the web,” launched last week. The new search engine, which is not affiliated with Google, makes use of “ ‘safe search’ technology” to favor Catholic-related sites and screen out “unsavory content.”

Snarky bloggers have seized on the browser's priggish tone, and largely dismiss it as a backwards attempt to censor information that's unfriendly to Catholic doctrine. Religion Dispatches offers a slightly more substantial take. It ran some hot-button words—contraceptives, abortion, stem-cell research—through the engine, and reports that it generally returned conservative Catholic sites.

But CatholicGoogle’s no Catholic Big Brother: The Religion Dispatches search results were shaped by the rhetoric of the search terms. By changing ‘contraceptives’ to ‘contraceptive rights’ and ‘abortion’ to ‘abortion rights,’ I received links to some progressive Catholic organizations, as well as NARAL, the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Atheism.com.

The site's not so ominous, then. Whether Catholics will find it particularly compelling is another story.

When a Catholic gets hurt, an image of the Virgin Mary could help soothe the pain. New research suggests that “religious belief alters the brain in a way that changes how a person responds to pain,” Irene Tracey of Oxford University told Science News.

For the research, Catholics, agnostics, and atheists were subjected to a series of electric shocks, some while looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary and some without the image. Practicing Catholics perceived less pain when they were staring at the Virgin Mary, Science News reports, and displayed increased activity in an area of the brain associated with “emotional detachment and perceived control over pain.” Agnostics and atheists didn't show the same kind of neuro-activity, nor the perceived pain reduction.

It’s hallelujah-worthy: a thoughtful argument for abandoning single-issue voting. Catholics should examine all of a candidate’s stances regarding “intrinsic evils,” writes theology professor Gerald J. Beyer for Commonweal, not simply his or her voting record on abortion. “In the U.S. political context, where no candidate perfectly mirrors Catholic teaching on issues such as abortion, war, stem-cell research, poverty, discrimination, gay marriage, and immigration, voting should be a difficult matter of conscience for Catholics,” writes Beyer. 

Instead of automatically supporting John McCain as the stronger anti-abortion candidate, Beyer advises Catholics to look at a range of domestic and foreign policy issues before deciding which candidate acts more in accordance with Catholic values. “Not only is Obama’s position on the war and his strategy to end it more consonant with Catholic teaching,” writes Beyer, “but his vision for the place of the United States in the international community much more closely resembles modern papal teaching on international relations.” 

Beyer urges Catholics to consider supporting Obama, even though he doesn't encourage them to accept Obama’s pro-choice position. Instead, Beyer writes that Catholic Obama endorsers “should strongly encourage him to take steps to limit the evil of abortion.”