New Vatican Documents on Internet Mainly Approving, Says Archbishop

VATICAN CITY — “The solution to the problems of the Internet is the Internet itself,” said Bishop Pierfranco Pastore, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, indicating that using the Internet for good was the only way to combat the evil uses of the same technology.

Bishop Pastore was speaking Feb. 28, along with Archbishop John Foley, president of the same council, about two new documents treating the Internet, Ethics in Internet and The Church and Internet, released the same day. Both documents are available on the Vatican website (www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_cou ncils/pccs/index.htm).

“The Internet is an opportunity and a challenge and not a threat,” said Archbishop Foley, addressing the attitude pastors in the Church should take. “A bishop is not a monk. He must pray, but he must also live and know the world in which his faithful live, in order to guide them and serve them.”

Ethics in Internet is part of an ongoing series on ethics in the media, following recent documents from the Pontifical Council for Social Communications on ethics in advertising and ethics in communications. The Church and Internet is focused on the Catholic use of the Internet, while warning against some of the dangers that exist. Both documents were drafted by Russell Shaw, an American journalist who has long written for the Catholic press, and who serves on the council.

The document notes moral failings present on the Internet, including hate sites, pornography, computer hacking and electronic theft, rumor and gossip masquerading as fact, and sensationalist journalism. In response, the document proposes self-regulation, backed up by international agreements which subject the Internet to the same standards expected in other media of communications, including television and newspapers.

Most interestingly, though, the Ethics document analyzes the Internet culture, and makes some critical observations about what one might call the “anthropology of the Internet.”

“An idealistic vision of the free exchange of information and ideas has played a praiseworthy part in the development of the Internet,” says a key passage of the document. “Yet its decentralized configuration ... also proved congenial to a mindset opposed to anything smacking of legitimate regulation for public responsibility. An exaggerated individualism regarding the Internet thus emerged. Here, it was said, was a new realm, the marvelous land of cyberspace, where every sort of expression was allowed and the only law was total individual liberty to do as one pleased. Of course this meant that the only community whose rights and interests would be recognized in cyberspace was the community of radical libertarians. This way of thinking remains influential in some circles, supported by familiar libertarian arguments also used to defend pornography and violence in media generally.”

“Fundamentally, we do not view the Internet only as a source of problems; we see it as a source of benefits to the human race,” the pontifical council hastens to add.

The document, however, also deplored “attempts by public authorities to block access to information” which embarrasses or threatens them, or the use of communication technologies to “manipulate the public by propaganda and disinformation, or to impede legitimate freedom of expression and opinion.”