Isn't that cute! The Church figured out the intertubes!

Today, Yahoo and the Christian Post both have an adorable, remarkably insightful story about how the Catholic Church is doing these days: the Vatican has finally figur'd out computers! How cute, Old Man Benedict can do the email with his grandkids now. How very modern of him. Or something:

The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes application created by a technologically savvy Italian priest, the Rev. Paolo Padrini, and an Italian Web designer.

The application includes the Breviary prayer book — in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Latin and, in the near future, Portuguese and German. Another section includes the prayers of the daily Mass, and a third contains various other prayers.

Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, praised the new application Monday, saying the Church "is learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelizing, as a way of being able to share its own message with the world."

Yes, isn't that something: the Inquisitors and Conquistadors have finally joined the late-20th century revolutionary concept of transferring information via the internet. What a ridiculous load of crap. All they did was get on board with iTunes and they've made the news?

Imagine if the world regarded you as so primitive, so backward, so out-of-touch, that all that you had to do in order to make world headlines was to do something not medieval. I mean look, the Catholic priest who came up with this application (Paolo Padrini) is described as "technologically savvy" because he figured out how to make an iTunes application.

Secular people practically own the internet. It's old news. We've been bloggging, podcasting, all of it, ever since the internet was invented. And now the Vatican has just figured out what this crazy "iTunes" thing is that all the kids are using. The Pope made headlines in 2005 because he figured out how to use a five year-old piece of technology known as a "text message" with the help of only a $90 million Peter's Pence Vatican budget.

The whole story is quite a commentary on what people really think about the Church. Why would it be news for them to use the internet if it didn't defy our understanding of the fact that the Church is a primitive, backwards relic from a superstitious, theocratic Dark Age?