Bill Gates didn't invent that strategy, he copied it from the Catholic playbook. The Church has survived two millenia in large part because it's willing to bend, albeit with glacial slowness, and subsume people and their beliefs into the "Universal" church. Think of all the South American saints who were once pagan deities in their own right. The Vatican has no intention of withering away, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the first official church service on Mars is a Catholic mass.

Come to think of it, Buzz Aldrin performed the first religious rite on the Moon just a few minutes after the Eagle touched down, and it was a Catholic sacrament. For all its flaws, the Catholic Church is an institution to be reckoned with.

It may sound odd for an agnostic to express respect for the Catholic Church, but I'm most comfortable with it because of its institutional stability and long-range perspective. Most of these young whippersnapper Protestant denominations don't have the common sense or political judgment of the Church. It helps that, unlike those Fundamentalists, I've found many Catholics willing to have meaningful discussions about theology. I was quite flattered when a priest with whom I argued once said that I ought to have been a Jesuit; and the existence of Jesuits as the Church's intellectual ninja speaks well of the Church.

A couple of years ago I wrote a white paper for the Archdiocese of San Jose about how it could use the Internet, and my main theme was that it had the opportunity to again become the "Mother Church" by building a general Internet infrastructure for Christianity. The idea was to provide facilities for all denominations, including a common library of Christian teaching that all the various denominational sites could draw upon. Yep, "embrace and extend" made manifest. I think that, with some necessary adjustments for ecumenical realities, they're trying to put some of my recommendations into practice. Time will tell whether they can achieve the grand reconciliation I challenged them to attempt. We'll see if the Internet can really change everything.

--Robert