Global Gossip

The first I knew about this latest amazing-what-people-will-believe hoax was when a friend posted this on Facebook:











It went around the Internet with breathtaking speed, being reposted on secularist and atheist blogs and Tumblr sites, and shared all over the place. It isn't true. It not only isn't true, it contradicts official Catholic teaching in the form of Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio of 1981 in which he declared that 'women have the same right as men to perform various public functions'. As usual I find it depressing that so many people can swallow this without questioning where the information comes from, whether it's prima facie likely that an archbishop could have said this and it go unnoticed (since 2007?), and whether the language sounds as though anyone at all might have used it at the start of the twenty-first century, not because of its sentiments, but because of the expression. I have a suspicion that somebody may have written it, at some time, though I can't identify the real source; but it sounds suspiciously antique, at least in English. The Spanish I can't speak for. I was relieved that somebody else commented on the picture "He probably feels that way. But I'm frustrated that there is no actual link to a decent article regarding the statement". At last, I thought, some sense; but many folk are content that something they see online confirms that a prominent individual 'probably feels that way'. It isn't just left-wing people who do this, either; the last time the yarn about President Obama's Holiday Tree surfaced and I repeated my insistence that it was false, a friend of a rather more conservative inclination commented, 'Well, it's not true now, but I wouldn't put it past him'.

The Internet allows such silly gossip to circulate, and, like ordinary village gossip, encourages us to think worse of each other than we have a real reason to. It's a world in which photographs can be doctored, quotations invented, and reputations damaged by anyone with access to simple software. It allows lies to reach far more people than could ever be touched by them in the old world. Cultivating a spirit of scepticism - of not believing what appears in front of you - has never been more urgent.