my DailyGood email from CharityFocus.org shares with me the following:
Roman Catholic bishops to faithful: Give up cell phone and Internet during Lent
By Larry Greenemeier
Concerned that Christians are not entering the Lenten season (which began last week on Ash Wednesday) with the proper spirit, some clergy are calling on their flock to nix text messaging for the next six Fridays leading up to Easter on April 12. Christians are annually asked to refrain from eating meat on Fridays and to pray more regularly during Lent, but the church has apparently gotten hip to the hold that technology has on its brethren. The diocese of Modena-Nonantola in Italy in particular is calling for text-messaging-free Fridays as a way for the faithful to at least temporarily rid themselves of reminders of “material wealth,” but the church is also calling for such digital abstinence in the name of human rights.
The diocese, in a statement on its Web site (translated from Italian to English using Google’s translation software) notes that 80 percent of the mineral coltan—a metallic ore used to make used in consumer electronics products such as cell phones, DVD players, and computers—comes from Kivu, the war-ravaged eastern region of the Congo, where “civil war has caused more than 4 million deaths in the last ten [sic] years.” The diocese says that the extraction and trade of coltan by Western industry has helped fuel warfare in this region of Africa (a statement, they say, backed by a 2003 United Nations report).
In Turin, Italy, the diocese is calling on followers to avoid television during Lent, the Associated Press reports. Meanwhile, in the northeastern city of Trento, the church has created a “new lifestyles” calendar with proposals for each week of Lent, some of which include biking rather than driving to work, refraining from throwing chewing gum on the streets, and doing without the Internet and iPods.
So far, no one is directly calling for a Lenten moratorium on Facebook or MySpace, two sites that Pope Benedict XVI has praised for “forging friendships and understanding,” according to the Associated Press.
Read the original article HERE.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I posted this on facebook under evan’s link to this noise there.
What is the rationale behind telling people to give up texting? It’s idiotic. Technology is the primary reason that productivity has gone nearly straight up for the last thirty years. Asking people to give up technological innovations for quasi-religious purposes seems counter-productive at best. The original reason for Lent was to give up meat and certain other foods, not to give up work. They gave up meat because there simply wasn’t any food left that late into winter. Most people basically starved at the end of winter and the church came in and put a stamp on the already existing starvation and called it Lent thus making starvation a moral imperative. Lame, not Lent.
In fact, the idea of battening down the hatches and weathering the later stages of winter, i.e. starving, predates Christianity. To morph the concept to accommodated the use of technology is pure and simple manipulation. Not surprising considering manipulation of the flock is the real business of most religions.
If people give up texting do they still have to give up meat?
Yup Suza (though I don’t pretend to be the Pope) meat on Fridays is usually a ‘given’ to Catholics. Your personal sacrifice on top of that? well, that’s the crux.
That’s why it’s so good to live in a coastal area if you’re catholic. I assure you no one in Louisiana ever suffered by eating crawfish, catfish, shrimp, seafood gumbo or the like!
I imagine they are not talking about texting and internet for work but more for private use, like television, anything that seems indulgent or addictive in nature so a person really notices the choice.
Just my 2cents.
This seems like a publicity stunt. Having demonstrated technophobic tendencies for decades, its no surprise to me that this obsolete religious corporation is trying to appear relevant and timely in this manner. Sadly, it only highlights their continual ineptitude at adapting to an ever changing world.
Pope-a-dope…
How about asking all those religious/pious/sick priests to call a moratorium on seducing alter boys for Lent?