How to win this lapsed Catholic back... with technology!

Both my parents are devout Catholics. My mom spends her retirement facilitating retreats for future Jesuit priests, and her conversations with my dad over spirituality and personal reflection prove very thorough. Their religious nature remains surprising for yours truly, someone who believes that there’s a supreme being yet can’t see the point of any religion — including the one he was born into, Roman Catholicism.

I am aware that the Catholic Church has an array of arguments designed for skeptics and uninspired members. The organization spent the last two thousand years facing challenges to its doctrine, after all. But why should I internalize any of the Church’s points, when the methods of presentation don’t take into account how we process information nowadays?

Who wants to sit through an hour of rote rituals, which include twenty minutes of a priest literally preaching to the choir? I never got into the whole religion thing, even as a kid dragged to Sunday mass by his parents. So my young adult self fails to see any compelling reason for devotion.

Information acquisition is the foundation of any faith-based experience. And many people my age learn new ideas (or new aspects of what’s already known) through fast-paced media like the Internet. Our collective acceptance of rapid-fire experiences and shallow impressions are literally rewiring our brains — with potentially bad consequences, as asserted by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.

Carr writes that the Internet’s focus on speed and instant delivery is limiting our ability to reflect and explore the complex characteristics of any issue — including the faith-based precepts. That may be a bad thing, but for any religion to remain relevant to its “market,” it has to adjust itself accordingly. For as American evangelical Christian minister Rick Warren once said: “You can’t save souls in an empty church.”

My girlfriend recently attended a mass hosted by Father Ely Santos from Don Bosco. The priest conducted his Eucharistic celebration in a Makati office. What stood out was his use of Powerpoint slides to complement his sermon, emphasizing the salient points of his spiel. More will be needed to pull me back to Sunday Mass, but it’s a start. And is there honestly anything wrong with Santos’ method to spread the word?

Photo credit: Sergey Gabdurakhmanov