MANILA, Philippines - The Internet has left no room for sanctity. Everybody gets a public platform to say what they want about anything or anyone they want. And while we can insist on so-called higher values such as respect, there really is no way to ensure it these days. It is an aspiration left to the individual’s volition. In the context of free speech, everything is free game. Case in point, the memes that have been created ever since Joseph Ratzinger became pope, especially the “Mahangin ba sa labas?†photos that have resurfaced since the announcement of his resignation.
If there’s anything to love about the Internet, it’s how it promotes the attitude of not taking anything too seriously. Regardless of your degree of faithfulness to a particular faith, when something is funny, something is funny.
It’s hard to imagine those parts of history we’ve been taught, painting a picture of how religion supposedly took on a more distant and authoritative stance, becoming even more important than the people themselves — a time when it was acceptable to execute someone for saying or believing the “wrong†thing. Sacrilege was a very serious matter then that cost people dearly. Today, it’s the word my stylist friend used to describe how strongly she felt about the maid stealing my eyelash curler before a date.
The hierarchy of values has thankfully shifted to taking care of actual people. Intelligent believers today (sorry, I had to qualify that), if you really listen to them talk about their faith, subscribe because they’re convinced that it benefits them. It is their preferred way of connecting to the bigger picture and tapping into something that’s beyond them. They don’t do so because it’s required or is the absolute right way to go.
Personal grasp
To have faith today is to be intimate, to have a personal grasp on everything you say you believe in. Virtue is meaningless if you don’t put it in the context of raw humanity. I guess that’s why in the Christian faith, Jesus had to become man. We like to be able to relate, to have someone go through the same drama as we do, and be assured that we can always bring our thoughts to the table — as opposed to it being a one-way arrangement where we have to assume the role of the inferior, and therefore passive, party.
These days people, whether classified as faithful or heathen, love and need to have a say—whether they’re about to utter something spiritual and profound, or merely want to point out that the venerable Pope Benedict XVI bears an uncanny resemblance to Darth Sidious. Hey, ideas are ideas, right? The more entertaining, the better.
I realize that this may not have been the intention of the meme creators, but I couldn’t help likening the memefication of the pope to the incarnation of Jesus. I’m not Catholic, so apart from living in a country where most people are Catholic, I didn’t really care about the papacy. All I knew was that @Pontifex was this old figure and spiritual leader whom a lot of people held in very high regard. With a great degree of reverence comes a great degree of distance. It almost felt wrong at first to be giggling at the memes BuzzFeed collated and sequenced into a hilarious narrative. But after laughing my head off, I felt like I could relate to him a lot more, even though I didn’t actually learn anything new about him. He was a person. He was someone we could make fun of the same way we got a kick out of posting each other’s doppelgangers on Facebook. Suddenly he didn’t seem so far removed.
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