Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Technology?

If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. This is an old adage, but the essence of it is still true. We used to go to conferences and conventions. As a speaker, I spent more time than I can count in cars, in airports, on airplanes, and yes, even on busses, so that I could inform and organize people to be the “voice for the voiceless in our prolife battle”.

The coronavirus has changed everything. Even as I am writing this, one of the biggest conventions in the world, the American Democratic Party Convention is consisting of people speaking to cameras and delegates watching from their basements. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops Fall Meeting is now spread over 5 days and the bishops are staying in their offices and in their homes doing it all on-line. The coronavirus means that we are all forced to make the switch from face to face to these forms of technological communication.

I cannot pretend this is not a problem for us here at Priests For Life Canada. We had originally planned to go to seminaries and to speak to seminarians. We considered having gatherings of young priests to update their knowledge of pro-life issues. We had even planned to go to the March for Life to participate and to meet as a Board. We are changing all that. Now, we must go to the mountain. We are planning to have webinars for priests, deacons and seminarians, making contact with, and inspiring clergy and would be clergy to be active as leaders within the pro-life movement. This not only takes planning. It takes training, equipment and technical backup in the person of “coaches” and technicians.

I am sure everybody reading this newsletter has been on Zoom meetings. Sometimes, they go well. Sometimes, they go very poorly. Have you forgotten to unmute when you really wanted to ask a question? This means that we need to have the appropriate technical support and to plan these webinars well so that the technology will not let us down.

There is the deeper question as to the effectiveness of these Zoom meetings (and by that, I mean any service that we will be using). The first is that these meetings are far more exhausting than they have any right to be. They seem to demand a sustained degree of attention and alertness that is hard to maintain over the course of an hour, let alone over several hours, that would be normal at a conference. Maybe this is some natural limit within our brains – after all even YouTube videos are just three to five minutes and people even pause Netflix routinely. It means we must do some hard thinking as to how we will structure these webinars, so they are not just “talking heads” speaking to empty desk chairs in front of a laptop.

Secondly, we also must consider the different ways that information is received and processed via screens. Is it best directed to the individual recipient in front of his or her laptop or is there a merit to gathering as a group together and having the normal social interaction facilitate the learning process? How do we interact with the presenter when the webinar participants are geographically dispersed?

We are working on all of this and we intend to forge ahead using and experimenting with this technology and these formats. One of our first efforts will be my giving a spiritual retreat to the Ontario Knights of Columbus on two consecutive time slots in late September. I know the idea of a virtual retreat must have seemed even ludicrous even six months ago but the Ontario State Council and Priests For Life Canada are adapting to this new reality and our on-going collaboration with the Knights of Columbus is proving exciting.

Thank you for the ongoing support. Your donations are going to fund some things I never thought we would ever need to fund six months ago but this is where we are now. Why should the devil have all the good technology? We intend to use what we have to train as we must to do what we can. Thank you for being partners in that.