"The cult of celebrity is poison…"

“The cult of celebrity is poison. People need to stop hoisting aloft every internet chatterer who thinks God has given him the power of excommunication against those who don’t happen to know their suffocating small constellation of shibboleths.

Read and heed. We internet loudmouths are not to be obeyed like bishops. When one of us pops off about Earth Day and stupidly declares, pronounces and defines that “if the priest even so much as breathes a word about Earth Day, throw nothing in the collection plate, finish your Sunday obligation and resign from that parish on Monday”, that does not constitute a de fide teaching of the Church. This sort of blind Pavlovian stupidity which teaches the faithful to respond to acoustic cues (“He mentioned Earth Day! Abandon ship!”) is a reflection, not of an intelligent Catholic approach, but of the kind of culture warrior mobthought that so much of the blogosphere facilitates.”

— Mark Shea, getting his Irish up over this.

Read the rest.

Others are starting to weigh in on this, including The Anchoress, who notes “the church is not a Democracy.”