Hello, is anybody home?

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Motherwit said:
Will you be able to have representation from the Church on staff to speak for the official Church position?
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Ideally, yes; I want the answers to be accurate to the Church’s teaching. There are some non-religious sites that do a nice job of answering complex questions in a very simple, straightforward way. For instance, “Stack Overflow” is a good site for those in the software industry where you can read the question and get a thorough, accurate answer by just reading the first response. That said, it will take us some time to get there.
 
As I mentioned, I run a private Catholic forum, and one of the regular posters there discovered your website in one of his perambulations around the Catholic interwebs, and made a discussion thread about it.

Since my forum is private, and I wanted to let the public forums know, I posted about it on Catholic Common Sense, a public forum on Proboards, that has a goodly number of CAFugees who read/ post there. The word appears to have now gotten around several Catholic forums.

By the way, several of us wrote to Catholic Answers a few days ago before you responded, asking if you and this website were legit. Two of us have yet to get an answer and the third person received an answer from Catholic Answers that said your forum was completely unauthorized and they had not sold any of their data. The plot thickens.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
By the way, several of us wrote to Catholic Answers a few days ago before you responded, asking if you and this website were legit. Two of us have yet to get an answer and the third person received an answer from Catholic Answers that said your forum was completely unauthorized and they had not sold any of their data. The plot thickens.
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I have reached out to my main contact at Catholic Answers. My guess is the information hasn’t yet been shared with everyone in the organization. A minor point is that the data wasn’t “sold” per se, but rather it was “given”.
 
Catholic-Questions said:
My ultimate goal is to provide a resource to help answer some of the thorny questions for Catholics. For instance, are Catholics morally obligated to get vaccinated?
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I read in the news that Pope Francis has said yes, there is a moral obligation to get vaccinated.
" “I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine,” the pontiff said in a Jan. 10 interview for Italy’s TG5 news program. “It is the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.”"
Nel colloquio con il nostro giornalista Fabio Marchese Ragona, avvenuto nella residenza Santa Marta in Vaticano, il Pontefice argentino ha affrontato vari temi, tra cui: la pandemia, il vaccino, i disordini negli Stati Uniti, l’aborto, la politica e com’è cambiata la sua vita a causa del virus. “Io credo che eticamente tutti debbano prendere il vaccino - ha detto il Santo Padre - è un’opzione etica, perché tu ti giochi la salute, la vita, ma ti giochi anche la vita di altri”.


 
Catholic-Questions said:
It’s hard to get an authoritative answer on some of these questions, and my goal is to help change that.
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If your goal is to help provide authoritative answers, you will need a team of official apologists like CAF used to have, and also an approval from your Ordinary, won’t you? I mean, it’s a different thing to have people like me answer these thorny questions, even if I know what resources I would point people to on such issues as Covid vaccines, and to have an “authoritative answer”. In the first event (me and other random lay Catholics, or random non-Catholics with or without an agenda, responding), you can bet there would be a variety of opinions on what could be considered as the Church’s official position. You already have an example of that upthread.
Catholic-Questions said:
By the way, would each of you mind telling me how you found this site?
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I’m an ex-CAF member and a current member of @Tis_Bearself’s private forum, where I found out the same way Bear did, when another poster happened on your site and made a thread about it.
 
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@OddBird - agreed that getting authoritative answers will be a challenge and there will be lots of issues to work through. Challenging but, I hope, useful. And I should stress that while that’s my ultimate goal, it may take many years and resources to get there. As a first step, I’m focused on getting the forum back online.
 
Thank you for your answer, Greg.
Catholic-Questions said:
And I should stress that while that’s my ultimate goal, it may take many years and resources to get there.
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I’ll tell you honestly what I think : I don’t believe you will have years, let alone many years, to build what you want. As you certainly know, Internet reputations are made so quickly now that a lot of your success will hang upon the quality of the space you offer once the site goes public, particularly for a site with such a history, which recently and publicly died a well-deserved death, and whose last months of existence left a sizable part of its former users with unpleasant feelings.

If you cannot guarantee that quality, if you launch the site in a “let’s see what happens and decide how to proceed on the way” spirit and simply notify its former posters that the site is back online, then I fear it will become, once again, the haunt of choice for scrupulous people who should know better than asking “is this a sin” questions to anyone but their confessors, folks with an agenda, and trolls who log in under dozens of different identities to tell us to pray for people who have Covid to die (yes, that really happened on here). You will probably struggle to attract and keep serious contributors, who make a good part of the reputation of a forum – and the ones CAF used to have have since said goodbye to forums, or found new homes elsewhere on the net. You risk attracting first and foremost those users who are still “homeless” for good reasons.

I hope you are aware, too, that you’re dealing with a “hand-me-down” forum whose reputation isn’t pristine to begin with, a forum which used to have some kind of an authority status and then effectively lost it. IMHO, if you want to try and reestablish the forum as an authoritative Catholic voice on the net, then you should try and restore that authority from day one – and that means having the right authoritative people on your team.

I’m sorry for being this blunt. As I said, I really hope you will succeed. I miss CAF before it really went downhill; it helped me on my road back to the Church, particularly way back when I was still a lurker, before the switch to Discourse. But I really wonder if you wouldn’t be better off starting with a clean slate, lower but immediately achievable aims, and maybe keeping this separately as a public searchable archive. As Bear said somewhere upthread, there’s a place out there for a moderate public Catholic forum. As far as I’m concerned, I would try and give it a go.

I’ve said my piece, and I do hope I didn’t ruffle your feathers. I’ll probably wait to see how this is going to be moderated before deciding whether to stay or not, and try to refrain from dispensing any more unsolicited advice.
 
Errr… friend, I think you meant to say thorny questions… 🥶

That other word has a very definite connotation, at least in North American vernacular English.
 
I would not be one of those “****ed” people. I think there is a lot here that is of great value (and not only my own writings 😇 … one could even raise some question about the value of those, and I might be the first one to raise those questions… 🤯 ) and I’m happy to see it preserved. I am content to let intelligent people “take the meat and leave the bones” — if they will read enough, and delve closely enough into matters, I think they’ll be able to see the content that is total BS, and treat it accordingly. If they’re not intelligent enough to do that, then I wouldn’t know what to say.

Examples of the “bones” would be the various postings of the man who had a bizarre fascination with intestinal issues (I actually felt sorry for that guy, he needed help bad), and the other man who was bound and determined to find anything — anything — even the existence of space aliens who created us (and who created them?) or random molecules-to-man evolution — to disprove either intelligent design or young-earth creationism, because he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that we were created by a transcendent God. Real pieces of work.

I’m glad to be back, though my participation may be minimal for the time being. I’ll keep reading daily.
 
@(name removed by moderator) - thanks for your comments - I do appreciate them. FWIW, I’m in the process of deleting your posts so this one will soon be gone. Feel free to copy the text and re-post it later.
 
@OddBird - thanks for your comments and you definitely didn’t ruffle any feathers. We have talked about how to avoid getting bogged down with issues of scrupulosity. And we definitely need to figure out how to manage the trolls.
 
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I always had it as a pet theory, that someone with scrupulosity or some mental issues, had suffered loss on account of something they read, or were told, on CAF, and that they might have threatened legal action. Just a wild thought I had, probably doesn’t mean a thing, but it’s not out of the realm of the possible.

I would welcome more participation, and possibly even moderation (not censorship, just moderation) from priests, and I even have to wonder if there could be either a retired or auxiliary bishop who could jump into the fray. As much as I am guilty of this sometimes myself, I have to question the prudence of having a gaggle of laypeople, commenting on every matter under the sun, with no clergy there at least to provide some gentle direction, as well as to correct those who are totally “out on the flight deck”, so to speak.
 
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Hello @Catholic-Questions I was permanently banned as Roseeurekacross very early into my membership, mainly for sticking up for Catholic clergy against another now banned member who was quite obsessed with liturgical abuses and clerical wear.
I was the first regular on the Discourse forums and the first poster in the regulars lounge.

I am asking to be reinstated as Roseeurekacross so I can read through my posts and see if I want them all deleted or not. Surely I have this right, given I am in Australia, and I had not signed up for forums to be run by others besides CA.

I wish you well in the resurrection of this forum and can see how it could be valuable in many respects. I also dont envy you in its running and moderation. I will also ask, you have floated the suggestion of paying for postings. Would that be a one time cost or per post or per thread.

Thanks for your time
Roseeurekacross posting as her lurker name LateranBasilica.
 
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