Is Wikipedia replacing the Bible as the source of all wisdom?

I DON'T NORMALLY GO to The Guardian for laughs, but I sure got a chuckle a couple of days ago when I read how the Vatican has been caught with its trousers around the ankles for some sloppy press work. (The Vatican isn’t a place I usually go for laughs, either, although the Sistine Chapel is well worth a visit.) You see, Pope Benedict expanded his College of Cardinals on January 6, a momentous event since these men will one day select the next Pope. In the excitement of the moment, it seems that some of the Vatican's junior staff, whose job it was to assemble a press release, decided to save some time by cutting and pasting the biographies of its twenty-two new cardinals from the Italian Wikipedia website.

Now as anyone who is in the writing and teaching business knows, this is always a risky undertaking. Regular readers of my blog know this too, since I have been chronicling the C&P shenanigans of German politicians (particularly the once and future “Black Baron,” Karl Theodor von und zu Guttenberg) with their dodgy dissertations more often than I care to think about. Back when I was a history professor here in Germany I regularly busted students who “borrowed” literally from Internet sources. One underachieving student, faced with writing a term paper in English, simply lifted an entire honors essay from an earnest student at Cork University in Ireland (it was the utter perfection of the paper that tipped me off) and another just cut and pasted at leisure, going so far as to rip off half a high school paper from a schoolgirl in Peoria. I counted five different unattributed sources before I finally gave up and gave her an "F." What many people both inside and outside the Vatican still don't seem to understand is that Google giveth and Google taketh away...

The Vatican’s unattributed shortcuts are equally embarrassing. I suppose they hoped nobody would notice, but isn't that an odd position for an institution founded on a belief in an all-seeing, all-knowing sky deity to take? According to the Guardian:

{Q}uestions were asked when many of the archbishops in line for promotion were described as Catholic – a statement recalling the frequently asked question: "Is the Pope a Catholic?"

In a tone that does not exactly match the Vatican's style, Willem Jacobus Eijk, the archbishop of Utrecht, is described as having a "strong tendency to conservatism, specially regarding abortion and homosexuality, which has made him one of the most talked about religious men in the country".

A Church spokesman responded to the questions the press release raised by saying that the document was merely provisional and that an official one would be released later on. Well, what was the man supposed to say? Once the Church starts using “papal infallibility” as its first-line defense, it’ll be time for the Pope to return to casting his nets along the shores of Galilee.

What I enjoy about this story is that it shows just how average, how genuinely human the Catholic Church really is deep down. It proves they really have been making it all up as they go along for the past 2,000 years – celibacy, the Spanish Inquisition, the Concordat with Hitler, all those horrific sex abuse scandals – and nobody is really in charge, least of all the Pope. Come to think of it, the Bible has a sort of C&P feel to it too. Don’t believe me? Read the Creation story, which starts and stops, and depicts God first as one person and then several, and get back to me. (And don’t get me started on Leviticus!)

But the story also raises far more serious concerns. Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer say “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven?” God made man in his own image, too. So what if the Lord has also been cutting and pasting for the past 4 billion years (or 6,000, take your pick)? What if he has been helping himself to bits and pieces from other gods and universes? Come to think of it, that would go a long way towards explaining the terrible things that have been going wrong with his Creation in recent years – wars, famines, epidemics, global warming, Rick Santorum…

If he were in my class, I’d tell him to tear it up and start over.