Or 'Will Blog for Prayers'
Since procrastination is the mother of invention (when it comes to blog posts), I proffer the following in lieu of my regularly scheduled programming.
It seems I'm unduly hyp-mo-tized by the resuts of the Catholic Blog Awards. I'm mostly interested in the shape of the curve - it's far more steep than I would've thought - and what that might say about this distinct group of Catholic bloggers and blog readers (likely mostly the former). (By the way, I'd like to thank the five voters for this blog! Very kind of you.)
Now if I were a statistician I might be able to say interesting things about this. Or maybe not given the limited sample size. Maybe this distribution would be the expected one.
But here is how I thought the curve would go:
The dominating win of "What Does the Prayer Really Say?" in this category ["Best Individual Catholic Blog"] was surprising, but even more so how its followers voted for it in pretty much every category. One gets the sense that the blog would've won for Best Group Blog if nominated. It finished tops in Best Apologetics Blog, Best Blog by Clergy/Religious/Seminarian, 3rd in Best Designed, 2nd in Funniest Catholic Blog, 1st in Most Spiritual and 1st in Smartest. You get the idea. (Best designed?) Either this guy is Cardinal Newman and the rest of Catholic blogdom is Jimmy Swaggart, or there's a cult of personality at work. Or maybe it's part of the innate desire of people to vote for a winner or to go with the latest fad. Maybe Catholic blog readers have a certain reluctance to vote with that Protestant ethic of "rugged individualism". People have a desire to be led, and Fr. Z has much of the criteria of leadership: confident, an insider, the authority earned by the collar, and very knowledgeable. His blog is surely deserving of an award based on merit but the wins all over the place show the lack of objectivity of those involved in a cult-of-personality (something we outsiders to Obamamania will recognize).
One big thing, I think it says, is that liturgy is what interests us most. The scratch that Catholic blogs seem to itch, or the itch that most readers want scratched, is the extreme angst felt over liturgical abuse. Ours appears to be a very religiously conservative group and not a particularly intellectual one as shown by the puzzling non-appearance of folks like Zippy Catholic, What's Wrong with the World, Bill Luse, Pertinacious Papist, Scott Carson's blog, and so many others. Or it could simply be that those perusing those blogs are less likely to go to the trouble of voting. (Aside: Mark Shea was a bit lower than I expected; I wonder if he's paying a price in popularity for his Bush loathing?)
Despite the steepness of the curve there is, however, an impressive breadth: some 119 blogs got at least one vote for "Best Individual Catholic Blog". The top vote getter got "only" about 13% of the vote. (Also, of course, the blogs are all (that I know of) in English, which is unfortunate given some of the excellent blogs written in Spanish and German and British (joke - remember the old line about America and England being two nations separated by a common language?)
Anyway, as said before, if I were a statistician perhaps I could say something more meaningful about all this. Instead I say there are lies, damnable lies, and (say it with me)...statistics. But I can say without hesitation that anyone reading this blog is a person of exceptional discernment and erudition. As proof, Steven Riddle reads this blog, and I might well remind him that he'd sure better pray me into Heaven seeing as how he'll be getting there first (not due to age but holiness of course).
Update: A reader writes:
I think you're absolutely correct in the interest in liturgical matters, as well as a desire for priestly leadership. There are a ton of people (it seems from the comboxes) who have suffered real injustice for many years in (for lack of a better term) having the Holy Mass and their parishes hijacked by a non-Catholic agenda...No disagreement here; it was the range of categories more than even the margin of victory that surprised me. No deprecation of Fr. Zuhlsdorf's blog intended or pretended by this post. This was merely to say that to win or nearly win in every category, including "Best Design", seemed interesting from a psychological perspective. Winning for "Best Design" calls some of the other awards into question. (Of course, it could be that some people only read Fr. Z's blog, so obviously they would vote for that blog for all categories.) (Full disclosure: I didn't vote, because I didn't want to put up with the hassle of registrating, which Gregg the Obscure also said was the reason he didn't vote.)
--WDTPRS was on top of the biggest Catholic story of the year--Summorum Pontificum--and a truly indispensable source of reliable and accurate information leading up to and following the worldwide implementation of the Motu Proprio. Rorate Caeli and NLM were good, but relied mostly on European news reports. Other bloggers relied, for the most part, on the VIS and Fr. Zuhlsdorf.
--Quantity and quality. What do you get when you have an energetic priest who has a lot of time on his hands (dissertation writing time, I think)? On average, 4 to 6 written posts daily, on a broad set of topics that were timely and interesting. The one feature that I found truly outstanding, though, was the series of Podcasts on
the Church Fathers. I don't think anyone else in Catholic blog-dom produced something comparable.
Gregg also sent me an email with this round-up:
The past year was one of major transition for the elders of St. Blogs. Fr. Tucker, the Angry Twins, the Ragemonkeys and Der Tomissar quit outright; Amy Welborn, Dr. Riddle, Dr. Schudt and Tom Kreitzberg cut way back on blogging; Kathy Shaidle went from Relapsed Catholic to secular conservative; Mark Shea went from a blog with a broad emotional range to a blog overflowing with anger, rage and fury (I used to read every day, now maybe once or twice a month to see if he’s still enraged); the center does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world! That, and Fr. Z is a heck of a blogger. His particular ministry is suited to a frequently-updated, content-rich blog. He has a great temperament and voice for blogging too. Your observation that people are deeply interested in liturgy – especially in liturgy that is reverent rather than “relevant” in the sense used in the 1970s – is spot-on.
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