Is the Pope a Catholic?

LOOKING for God? Log on to the Internet. I did. Typing His holy name into the meta-search engine Ixquick turned up 5,612,142 hits. Unfortunately, top of the list was god.co.uk, the Global Online Directory, on the front page of which is a link labelled `hot & sexy'. Falling at the first moral hurdle, I found myself only two more clicks from an invitation to visit the `best sex sites: beastiality [sic], zoo sex, cocks, bestiality [as practised by more literate perverts, perhaps] . . . amateur . . . g-spot, [and] Lolita'. But put Satan behind you and you will find that there is enough spiritual bread on the Web of Heaven to feed you till you want no more. My own mini-pilgrimage was brief- more of a ramble, really - but I quickly found that not only are there countless Churches on the Net; there is even one that is exclusively of it: the `First Church of Cyberspace'. The founder of the online Church - Let There Be Light! (Enter here) - is the Revd Charles Henderson, a Presbyterian minister who believes - metaphorically, at least that `in the beginning was the Web'. You can find out why at www.godweb.org.

The Pope too has a `virtual' presence. Beneath the Apostles' shining dome there is now a battery of computers named after archangels and tended by a nun. Together, they keep aloft www.vatican.va, which is accessible in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and English, though not, miserrime ditto, in Latin. Among its many features is a television link to the Vatican. This does not offer spy-cam glimpses of papal domesticity, but something altogether more prosaic: contemporary Catholic worship.

If you are looking for more dignified liturgy, visit church-of-england.org, wherein the Scripture still reassuringly `moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness' though the `God all-matey' school of worship inevitably gets a look-in. There is also advice on how to get going with private prayer: `Be creative: use music, a stone, a feather, a flower, or a candle to help you focus. If you are little, or elderly, be careful with candles!'

A site on which stones are for casting rather than contemplating is truecatholic.org. The truecatholics believe that the `real' Holy See is presided over by Pope Pius XIII, who declares that John Paul II is an impostor - as were John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I before him. The world viewed from this website was popeless between the death of Pius XII on 9 October 1958 and 24 October 1998, on which date one Father Lucian Pulvermacher rather sportingly popped on the papal tiara in a rented hotel ballroom in Kalispell, Montana.

Whether the true successor to St Peter is John Paul II or Pius XIII won't bother anybody at www.1335.com, the home of Open Bible Ministries, whose director, Alan Campbell, identifies the `entire dynasty of popes' as Antichrist - a theory Mr Campbell is not allowed to advance in his capacity as head of religious studies in a Northern Ireland interdenominational secondary school. Acting privately, however, he maintains an interesting online apostolate known as `Romewatch International', publishing gleefully gleaned news stories with headlines such as `The Robber Priest', `Priest Found in Bed With Two Boys', `Father Dennis/Denise', `The Sex-Change Priest' and (best/worst of all, perhaps) `Former Champion of Bible Christianity Falls Victim to Rome's Charms'.

A present champion of Bible Christianity, the eponymous President of the Bob Jones University, is unlikely to be so easily seduced. At www.bju.edu he dismisses Catholicism in the same breath as Mormonism: they are `cults which call themselves Christian'. To visit his website is to see pictures of the most conservatively dressed undergraduates in Christendom and to go some way towards understanding the perspective of the Revd Dr Tan Paisley, the college's most famous alumnus.

An all-singing, all-dancing site for the Bible-based is njcnews.org, home of the 30year-old New Jerusalem Church, `with articles on Salvation, Faith & Encouragement and' (if only I'd gone there first!) `Overcoming Temptation'. If you are a fan of fonts - typographical ones, that is - a visit here is a must. You will never see a greater variety on one page. After all that visual excitement you might like to visit www.tyburnconvent.org.uk and take a virtual tour of a place whose transcendental calm reflects the near-emptiness of the convent in reality. One highlight is a threedimensional image of a nun's solitary cell, though I couldn't find a nun in it however frantically I fiddled with my mouse.

And yet if God works in mysterious ways, why shouldn't the World Wide Web be one of them? It may be easier for a camel to go through the dot of a domain name than for an Internet entrepreneur to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but for ordinary browsers, logging on to the Net might just get us on the superhighway to salvation. The founder of the First Church of Cyberspace likens the invention of the Internet to that of the printing press, in that each offers ordinary people direct access to the truth. But with infinite versions of the truth on the Web, a search without guidance appears daunting. And a search for a `guide' on Ixquick returns 27,929,185 hits.

Copyright Spectator Jun 17, 2000
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