Pope: Internet Has 'Numbed' Young People

The Vatican has had a mixed relationship with the Web.

Last year, executives from Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook coached Catholic bishops about Internet culture. Pope Benedict XVI also launched a YouTube channel, has encouraged priests to blog, and has told young Catholics to use the Internet to share their faith.

But Benedict issued a warning to Internet users late last week, cautioning that the Web has "numbed" young people and created an "educational emergency -- a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence."

"A large number of young people... establish forms of communication that to do not increase humaneness but instead risk increasing a sense of solitude and disorientation," Benedict also said, according to the AFP.

Last month, Benedict remarked that technology should set off an "alarm bell" and was leading to an "indifference towards real life."

"New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality," he said.

Comments

[joeyfoto]

08:09 AM on 01/04/2011

And, what's your excuse, Father, for the incomprehensible insensitivity of your church to the cries of generations of children, who your priests abused and who your church cruelly refused to protect? How dare you talk about increased "humaneness" — if that is even a word — when, for centuries, your church has acted in a way that were an insult to all humanity.

Please, keep your pompous, platitudinous nonsense to yourself, or at least save it for your sheep.

[K Rednosed Rupert]

04:39 PM on 12/17/2010

Of course non-stop Catholic sex scandals have nothing to do with young adults' "sense of solitude and disorientation."

[gnosius]

04:37 PM on 11/20/2010

If the Internets are so bad for you, what do you have a Vatican website for?

Nothing "numbs" our young more than the information one can find on the Web about the true history of the church, information about the crimes committed by its priests and the irrational promoted by the religious dogma.

On the same token, open a course taught in our colleges and universities titled Human Biology and you will find there that it is a mistake to look for information on the theory of evolution on the Internet. Sometimes both the church ideologues and the scientist whose mind is trapped in belief are fighting a common enemy: the truth. Free access to the truth is a dangerous reality for both of them.

[one1byke]

09:57 AM on 11/17/2010

A Priestly Bone to the Buttocks is 'prolly' worse than Google. (Prolly not 'much' worse)

[eric14]

09:40 AM on 11/17/2010

For a mind-numbing experience in virtual reality, visit the Vatican. Don't miss the busts of famous Romans down side galleries on way to Sistine. For teenage surfers: a 'bust' in this context (I am sorry to tell you) is a sculpture of head and shoulders. Not the shampoo.

[KarateKid]

08:58 AM on 11/17/2010

No, Ratzy, it's all those kiddie porn sites your priests go to.

I once had a summer job working in a porn shop in San Francisco, and you should have seen the clergy who came in, it was hilarious. They never read the magazines, only the paperback books. I learned more about human nature from that job than any other.

[TOS100]

08:36 AM on 11/17/2010

Ratzinger has no room to speak on intelligence, or morality, for that matter.

[myriadcorp]

12:21 AM on 11/17/2010

"New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality,"

I think the Catholic Church is afraid people will have access to information which proves their dogma is based on delusion. The best cure for the God Virus is a strong education and access to information. Obviously the Internet is a threat to the Virus in the Popes Eyes.

"educational emergency -- a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence."

The only emergency is people will learn the truth and that weakens the hold the Catholic Church has on people. His comment of responding with creative intelligence made me laugh. I would call it creative manipulation so they can keep their numbers up. The amount of people turning away from the monotheist mythologies are at an all time high. I hope it continues so we can progress as a species.

[Patrick Morrison]

11:27 PM on 11/16/2010

Ahhh, Pope Benedict XVI, the great critical theorist of our times.

[darthmaul]

09:56 PM on 11/16/2010

This from the organization that imprisoned Galileo and has been one of the single largest impediments to scientific advancements in human history. Forgive me Padre if I don't listen to your worthless opinion.

[billyzazen]

09:23 PM on 11/16/2010

the internet isn't causing the desensitization. In children they 'may' overuse it as a response to a lifestyle that causes it however. Children play in their yard and often their neighbors yard provides a border, a rigid wall you can't pass. They go to school and try to make the most of their surroundings which causes them to try and stuff or ignore the sheer banality of it. There are rigid borders everywhere here. They go with their parents and always too quickly from place to place because they don't understand that under our system you have to keep spending money to justify your reason for being at a particular place, many of these places stir up wants in the child and it's rigid border, border, border. The parents tell them to do things 'cause I said so' which causes integration problems within the child, many times they change their rules arbitrarily and the rules themselves are rigid border after rigid border. So the kids being introduced to video games or the internet find some atleast virtual reality with -NO BORDERS - and they want to crawl up in there and never come out. If they did it with booze it would be called alcoholism. It's escape-ism and they're trying to tell us something that we can't hear because we think we can't change it -'the world kinda stinks'...Yeah, but it's gonna stink even worse if you can't participate in it at all so come on outa there

[Slate 1947]

06:32 PM on 11/16/2010

I'm sure the Pope sees the Internet as dangerous. It gives people access to information and new ideas that were beyond there reach not long ago.

There seems to be a correlation between an increase in education and a decrease in religiosity, which is reflected over the past 40-years in all western societies. Let's face it. The church is a business involved in sales, and a reduction of customers effects the bottom line.

[darthmaul]

09:57 PM on 11/16/2010

Well said!

[RGKahn]

04:58 PM on 11/16/2010

Listening to you causes disorientation.

[Scribe57]

04:06 PM on 11/16/2010

If only these guys had not run and covered up a huge pedophilia ring, I might be able to take them seriously.

[LMPE]

03:02 PM on 11/16/2010

Um, Ratso? You do realize that talking about young people in your speeches...well, you get the idea.