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Blog Diego

Catholic Bloggers in San Diego

BY ROBERT KUMPEL

"If you have a pastor saying something crazy today, it will be exposed worldwide tomorrow. Now that's accountability!" And that's just one of the reasons Gerald Naus joined the ranks of Catholic bloggers.

Just as websites such as The Drudge Report have used cyberspace to liberate news from the confines of television networks, Catholic weblogs, or "blogs," are exploding as sources of information and opinion about the Catholic Church. Catholic websites have been online since the internet revolution of the 1990s. But weblogs are online journals where information and opinion are shared by those who visit the site.

San Diego has its own share of Catholic bloggers, ranging from seasoned experts in the faith to new converts. Among the latter, Naus, 34, operates The Cafeteria Is Closed.

The closed cafeteria blog focuses on issues as wide-ranging as art, music, Catholic culture, architecture, and liturgy (Naus's favorite subject). He likes to think of his site as edifying to the faithful, but he doesn't shrink from exposing anything he finds outrageous. "Most of my readers are of one mind. One story that got people really excited was the story about banning kneeling at that parish in Orange County (St. Mary's by the Sea in Huntington Beach). Cardinal Mahony draws a lot of fire too. I covered his Religious Education Congress."

Recent posts at The Cafeteria Is Closed include photos and mocking commentary of modernist church architecture, posts about the aborted Canadian terrorist strike, and a story about senator Ted Kennedy's opposition to any homosexual marriage ban. He has a hall of fame honoring gutsy bishops, the first inductee being Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City for his expansion of the Latin Mass indult. Francis Cardinal Arinze is honored for asserting the need for fidelity in liturgical translations.

Naus came to San Diego from Austria in 1997 and currently lives in Pacific Beach. He became a Catholic on Holy Saturday of 2005 at Saint Brigid's Church. "When I was a kid, we were Jehovah's Witnesses, but we left that. Today my parents laugh that they ever belonged to that, but it turned me off on religion for a long time. I think supernatural reasons brought me to the Catholic faith, especially when I saw Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. I saw it on Easter Sunday of 2004 and enrolled in RCIA a week later."

The posts on Naus' weblog reflect a knowledge of Catholic doctrine as well as an appreciation of tradition and culture -- a knowledge and appreciation which he had to cultivate on his own. He laughs. "I really don't give much credit to RCIA. They gave me quite a bit of information, but I found it somewhat lacking. The sister who led us was an extremely lovely person, but she had a 1960s-'70s hangover. They don't like to talk about converts and it's always 'Our Catholic Faith Tradition' implying that all the other faiths are just as valid. We never used the Catechism. I asked them if I could take a test to get out of it, but they wouldn't let me!"

Since opening his site in April 2005, Naus is astounded at how rapidly it has grown. "It's one of the five biggest around. We have more daily readers than anybody except maybe Amy Welborn. I'll get 5000-10,000 views per day. It's gone crazy in the last six months."

Naus continues, "I'm still shocked at how many people will get into an issue. It's not uncommon to get 60, 70, or over 100 comments on a story. We have a forum now where people can say whatever they want."

Naus believes the huge number of responses reflect a need that the Church-controlled media refuse to acknowledge. "Catholics want to point out the silly stuff and point out the good stuff. It seems that there is a springtime in the Church, where there is very little tolerance left for that old silliness. It's almost like people came out of a dungeon into the light, like they've been released from the 1970s! A lot of people have been longsuffering and they've had no way to vent except maybe to a close friend. Nowadays, people seem to be enjoying the freedom."

The freedom of the internet now, says Naus, has redefined the term lay empowerment. "People used to think that they couldn't do anything about the abuses they suffered, but now, with the internet, they have a voice. Take that Orange County story. Eventually, the L.A. Times covered it, and the next thing you know, Bishop Brown is showing up for Mass at Saint Mary's, and he says he's willing to talk with them. Yet it never became a story until the blogs posted it."

With a background in law and musicology in Austria, Naus currently works in software, but hopes that he can eventually support himself by operating his blog. "Advertising and donations cover the costs. I'm thinking of having a pledge drive in the fall and see what comes from that. Other bloggers do that quite successfully. I also make quite a few speeches."

On his site Naus goes by the name of Gerald Augustinus (his confirmation name). His co-contributor is Dr. Erin, a clinical psychologist who is his fianceé. "We're getting married in December."

Some Catholic blogs, such as Rorate Caeli and Whispers in the Loggia restrict their subject matter to religious and ecclesial issues. But most of the blogs are run by laypeople who like to add their own special interests. News Notes's own Matt Lickona, a self-confessed pop-culture junkie, fills his blog, Godsbody ("A Website... Concerning Matters both Sacred and Profane") with a Catholic perspective on societal trends, his own experiences as a father, and moral decay, all seasoned with a biting wit.

Godsbody went online in April 2005, initially to promote Lickona's book, Swimming with Scapulars. "I was trying to establish a 'web presence', but I made it a point not to talk about the book in the blog. It was more to give people an idea of my personality and my thoughts. Since then, the blog has kind of taken on a life of its own."

Because his web log was related to his book -- which is a spiritual memoir -- Lickona feels less constrained with the subject matter. A recent visit to the site, the posted topics included some observations about his oldest son's marketing proclivities, a review of a film soundtrack, and another blogger's comments on artist Andrew Wyeth.

Lickona admits that his site doesn't have a large following. "I get maybe a couple hundred views a day. Amy Welborn (one of the biggest Catholic bloggers) gets about 12,000 per day. I've always viewed myself as the dimmest, blinkingest star in the Catholic blogosphere."

The biggest controversy Lickona has had to deal with so far involved a question of semantics. "I used the word 'Philistine' to describe someone and someone else accused me of using a bigoted term. Technically, 'Philistine' refers to a semitic race that once existed, but I was using it in the modern sense of a person who lacks culture, refinement, and taste. At first it was two or three people, and all of a sudden everyone starting joining in. One of the dangers of blogging is that printed words don't always reflect tone and I soon found myself having to explain, then I had to explain my explanations and it got very convoluted. It thought, 'Why am I spending my time arguing with a couple of anonymous nitpickers?'"

Which brings up another blogging problem, the presence of "trolls." That's the blogging term for people who deliberately post incendiary comments on blogsites. "These people basically exist to rag on the blog's proprietor. I've been tempted to ban a couple of people from my site, but I haven't. The vast majority of responders keep a civil tone," Lickona says.

San Diego boasts one of the top apologetics blogs on the internet. It's maintained by Jimmy Akin who insists his site (www.jimmyakin.org) is about more than apologetics. "I do a good bit of writing about theology, apologetics, canon law, liturgy, and moral/pastoral questions, but I also deal with science, science fiction, technology, humor, current affairs, diet, economics, movies, languages --basically anything that interests me. Many readers have commented that the topical diversity of the blog is one of the things they most like about it."

Akin's blog attracts a broad readership, averaging 7000-9000 views per weekday. It won the 2005 Catholic Blog award for Best Apologetics Blog. "Though my main audience is Catholic, many of my readers are non-Catholic and even non-Christian. The blog also attracts readers from a large number of countries, including places like Canada, England, France, Australia, Malaysia, and Hong Kong."

Many of Akin's readers send him specified questions regarding sacramental discipline, Church rules, and family members outside of the Catholic faith. After apologetics, science fiction is the most frequent topic covered at Akin's site. May's posts included items about Star Trek, The 4400, Battlestar Galactica, and The Da Vinci Code. Part of Akin's fascination with science fiction comes from his interest in history. "Humans have always had an impulse toward imagining fantastic scenarios. In fact, imaginative fiction has been the major form of fiction in human history. It is only recently that realistic fiction has come into fashion. God may not have made our world the way it appears in different science fiction stories, but it raises questions about how God might have made the world."

Every blogger spoken to admits that he often uses information from other bloggers, but such practice is not against blog protocol, so long as the original source is credited and properly linked. Each blogger combs the internet daily, looking for new items of interest. For Akin, this always means preparing in advance. "I'm always on the lookout for ideas for blog posts. Sometimes these come to me when reading about things online or in books or when watching TV or movies. Sometimes they come in the form of questions people send me or links to web pages they think I might like to blog about. Some are ideas I come up with while thinking about things I'm interested in or that haven't occurred to me before."

As a convert, Akin says the Catholic faith has expanded his view of the world. "I came from a background where I viewed Christians as a bunch of killjoys who were expected not to be interested in anything other than religion. After becoming a Christian myself, I decided to fight this stereotype by showing that a Christian can be interested in many topics, including ones that aren't explicitly religious. That's one of the reasons that I post on so many different topics."

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