Culture

For all its popularity, the Internet is raising very important social, cultural and political questions. Headlines remind us that texting while driving can have lethal results. University professors find themselves competing unsuccessfully with student smart-phone use in class. Parents find it necessary to place filters on computers to protect their children from exposure to pornography and violence. Hackers invade nations and corporations, leaking secret information, stealing identities, even halting movie distribution.

Enter Pope Francis, unburdened by the richly threaded horse collar-like stole in which newly elected popes had traditionally planted the staff of their authority on St. Peter’s loggia, as monarchs once did their flags on the beaches of newly conquered lands or the fallen cities of conquered ones. The crowds that stretched around the electronically girded world witnessed something very different on that March evening two years ago.

There’s no use denying that a certain vestigial Englishness is a persistent strand in our American DNA. This is not strictly a matter of colonial history—that our nation’s so-called founding fathers, to a man, began their lives as subjects of the Crown. It is more like an affectionate familial bond with an old relative from a half-remembered hometown; a fond recognition, from a comfortable distance, that we share with the United Kingdom something more than a language but less than a lineage.