Bishop Philip Egan and I are sharing a brain cell. This is scary.

Bishop Egan for many reasons I won't go into here has rarely been one of my favorite people.  The Bishop of Portsmouth is rarely backward in coming forward when speaking to the press, and I consider some of what he has said in the past to be not the best way of reaching out to people who are walking away from the Catholic Church.  That's all I'm going to say, so asking me for details won't get them.  Feel free to google what he's said in the past.

But that doesn't mean he's always wrong either.

Just today I found this.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/english-bishop-exhorts-faithful-to-be-charitable-online/

"In moral decisions, including the decision about what to post online, “we cannot choose simply on the basis of what gives us pleasure and what causes us pain,” wrote Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth in a pastoral letter released March 19.

Instead, in the letter titled “Sin, Lent, Redemption," he said people should focus on “what is right and what is wrong, recognizing that often, to do the right thing involves self-sacrifice.”

Bishop Egan asked Catholics to pay attention to their interactions on the internet. “How do I use Facebook or Twitter? Am I charitable when blogging?" he asked. "Do I revel in other people’s failings?”

“All this is grave matter,” Bishop Egan taught in his letter, which will be read at parishes of the Portsmouth diocese March 23. Grave matter – something that directly contradicts one of the Ten Commandments – is one of the three necessary conditions for a mortal sin, he noted.

So Bishop Egan, if you're reading this (which I find unlikely in the extreme) - on this point I will happily agree with you one hundred per cent.  God bless you and keep you, and no doubt we will disagree again, which is also unlikely to ever worry you.  But God bless you anyway.