The Vocation of the Catholic Blogger

Boniface, who takes blogging a whole lot more seriously than I do, pens a sort of manifesto about what he takes to be the vocation of the blogger. More power to him. The world needs Catholics who think about such things and try to work out the theological implications. The Faith, after all, is Catholic–and therefore about everything, including blogging.

That said, this is the sort of thing that would engender tremendous performance anxiety in me if I ascribed to it. I do blogging as a sort of lark. It’s a chance to say whatever I feel like saying without too much solemnity surrounding it. I’m not writing for the Ages. I’m just dashing off ideas and shooting the breeze with readers. It’s a great gift for somebody like me–an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s job–to have a tool for writing interactively. Sometimes I will try out an idea here that becomes an article elsewhere. Sometime I just want to tell a joke. Now and then I will do something stupid as, for instance, when I stupidly published that account of the Sungenis conference that some reader sent me without bothering to check the accuracy (mea culpa). When I screw up, I try to make things right by deleting or editing offending posts, as I did with that one.

I try to run a clean joint and keep things on the up and up as best I can, though I know there are still people who hate me. Oh well. But on the whole, I regard blogging as a chance to gab somewhat informally about whatever interests me at the moment, from a Catholic perspective. While a manifesto may be helpful for other folks (and God bless those who find it so), such an approach solemnizes these proceedings more than I prefer them to be solemnized. This is my living room, not Church–though it is, of course, a Catholic living room and I ask readers to observe ordinary living room rules of discourse.