✣ Highlights from the week online
A bishop’s conversion to social media At Crux, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, told Christopher White why he’s started using Twitter more. Bishop Tobin used to think the social media site was trivial. But “I came around and thought: the President is using it and the Pope is using it… It has an impact.” Bishop Tobin has become known for some outspoken opinions. After Ireland voted to legalise abortion, he tweeted: “The Western world has lost its moral compass; it is adamantly atheistic and amoral.” More recently, after asking for prayers for his back pain, he added: “The good news is that my tweeting finger is working just fine. Infidels, heretics, atheists and apostates: beware!” The bishop says his more personal tweets – “about my dog, or about the weather, or about my family, or the Steelers or the Patriots” – are a way to “humanise” his office. But he has also observed on the website: “It just occurred to me that if I spent as much time with my Bible as I do with my smartphone, I’d be a much better bishop.” Doing justice to the immigration question At Catholic News Agency, JD Flynn asked what a just Catholic approach to immigration would look like. He was responding to widespread reports of parents being separated from children at the US-Mexico border. Certainly, Flynn wrote, the “indiscriminate” separation of families must be stopped. But “how should the identity of family members be verified at the border, to ensure that children are not being trafficked? That issue needs more than moralising or grandstanding. It needs a real solution.” Flynn said that the US has the right to control its borders, and “to call on Central and South American countries to reform their economies and to quell the violence and disorder that spurs emigration”. But for both moral and economic reasons, the US can also accept many more migrants. “This is not a matter of charity. It is a matter of justice. ‘The money you have hoarded,’ St Basil the Great wrote in the fourth century, ‘belongs to the poor.’” The perks of family life in the Vatican What is life like for the 30 laywomen who live in the Vatican? At Aleteia, interviewed Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi, the wife of a Swiss Guard, who described the world’s smallest country as “one big family”. It’s also a place where it’s “natural” to attend Mass, dress modestly and celebrate the major feasts. For her daughters, aged 8 and 10, life in the Vatican “guarantees profound intellectual and spiritual formation. It strengthens our moral character, which seems to me to be extremely important in today’s world.” Wolińska-Riedi’s marriage was blessed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger. Today, the family can visit him or bump into him in the Vatican gardens. “Neither my husband nor I thought at that time that our marriage was being blessed by a future pope. The close ties have remained for years and I treat this sequence of extraordinary events in my life as a great sign of Providence.”
