RNS
VATICAN, March 17, 2009: For the past two months, the Catholic Church has been overcome by one fairly straightforward question: Why didn’t the pope know that the bishop he welcomed back into the church had extremist views that would cause so much embarrassment? Last week, the pope had an answer. He hadn’t Googled it. “I have been told,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote to the world’s Catholic bishops on March 10, “that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on.
Information, today, is available far beyond the mainstream media sources. Personal websites, YouTube and independent bloggers share a forum that is as visible as their Google rank, analyzing each positive action and quickly denouncing missteps.