Over at Rorate Coeli, folks seemed to know what they thought of Pope Francis’s new encyclical the moment it came out. All they had to do was pump the encyclical through a word cloud generator and shazam! The truth was out:
They add this little note: “Word Cloud of the Encyclical: Not exactly, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30)” The biggest word in the whole cloud is “human”–and notice the little arrow they put in, pointing to the tiny word “Jesus”? Cute!
Now that we have the master method for determining the catholicity of papal encyclicals, I wonder what would happen if we generated a word cloud for some old classic? Let’s try Libertas praestantissimum, by Leo XIII:
Shoot. The biggest word is “liberty”–and Jesus doesn’t even appear in the cloud! And did you notice that “reason” has huge letters, while “faith” is nowhere to be seen? Now that we know the secret to judging magisterial documents, we may need to re-write the history of doctrine….
[A tip of the hat to Peter Kwasniewski, who both found the Rorate link and created the Libertas word cloud.]
haha – awesome.
Doesn’t Kwasniewski write for Rorate Caeli?
He does, but he’s also a fair-minded guy who’s willing to point out when things get silly.