Credit for the brilliant headline goes to Christianity Today, for its story on the rising popularity of Scripture apps. I am reminded of something a Catholic priest friend told me some years ago, when I was complaining about how hard it is to live as an orthodox Catholic when you can’t trust your priest or your parish authorities to tell you what the Church really teaches. While acknowledging the truth of my complaint, he said that orthodox Catholics today have it so much easier than they did when he was a kid. Thanks to the Internet, you can find out for yourself what the Church really teaches. Don’t think your parish is offering your children an adequate religious education? Thanks to Amazon.com, you can have any good Catholic book you want sent to your home within days, and build with ease a library of which Thomas Aquinas himself could only have dreamed. His point was that technology is making traditionalism and orthodoxy far more of a living option than it was just a few short years ago. A paradoxical truth.

In that spirit, here’s something for you: the New Yorker reports on ways that the iPad and prayer-and-scripture apps are revolutionizing worship for people of all religions. Excerpt:

Monsignor Donald Sakano, of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Little Italy, echoed Kaunfer’s sentiments. “Perhaps memory has been affected,” he said. “But why is this a problem?” He has long since stopped feeling embarrassed when people ask him tricky theological questions and he has to Google the answers. “Before, I would just have to look smart and try to respond to them,” he says. Now he never gets it wrong. Sakano sees tremendous potential in the Catholic Church’s embrace of the digital. He is currently working on a project to outfit Old St. Pat’s sanctuary with flat-panel monitors in a way that won’t disrupt the vertical sight lines of the Gothic design. “Ideally,” he told me, “we’d have tiny screens on the back of the pews, like at the Metropolitan opera. Can you imagine? We’d be able to send parishioners personalized messages.” He wonders if a digital offertory could be incorporated into the mass somehow, so that the moment of giving would be preserved, but people wouldn’t have to carry cash. And he thinks that digitizing all the books in the church would help with the clutter problem: the Catholic Church is currently making changes to the mass (a version “more faithful to the original Latin” goes into effect on November 27th), he told me, and new books and hymnals have been pouring in. Wouldn’t it be better without “these big, fat books?”

Ultimately, Sakano said, the changes are exciting. “This is a shift in culture and form. That might be uncomfortable for some people, but it’s not a bad thing, and it’s certainly not immoral.” Religion, he said, has always found ways to survive, even thrive, in changing times. “It is simply building its nest on a new branch.”