There's a lot of interesting items in the article -- such as the Byzantine-like maze of medieval sounding orders and subgroups. Ecclesia Dei. Society of St. Pius X. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It's no wonder that Dan Brown novels are so popular. There is such an air of secrecy and intrigue.
Anyway, one paragraph in the story struck me.
The Vatican said at the time that the pope did not know of Williamson's background and Benedict himself then acknowledged, in a letter to bishops, that the Church had to learn to use the Internet properly.Two items jump out in my mind.
1. The article capitalized "Internet" but not "pope." I don't know what the style manual says about that. Nor am I certain as to why internet should be capitalized at all.
2. The Vatican is just now learning how to use the internet? Really? The Vatican's technology skills are behind most elementary school kids? I'm not sure what that means.
Institutional momentum is a tough thing to transform.
Posts
1 comments:
Very interesting. Style guides have always capitalized internet, but I've been in your camp for a number of years. No need. It is interesting about "pope." I imagine non-Catholic style guides would not cap it.
I have a classmate who has made great use of the Vatican's "secret archives." It's a web-based archive of masses of ecclesiastical literature. They know how to use the internet. Maybe just not for current research.
Another style guide issue that needs to change: citations. Nowadays all one needs is book, author, year, and maybe publisher. No need for city. That only confuses issues with the number of acquisitions over the last decade. We need to drop it.
Post a Comment