Frank H and the new evangelization of Pope Francis

MANILA: Pope Francis is a celebration of life itself. Born 17 December 1936 in Flores, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Flores means flowers; buenos aires means good air – what else do you want? I'm from the Philippines, the largest Asian Roman Catholic country; as far as this Catholic can see, with "the Francis Effect," don't cry for me, Argentina.

Why, at 78, Pope Francis has the body, mind and soul to evangelize us Catholics (we need that because we don't know what we know), as well as evangelize the whole world (because they don't know what they don't know). He takes all kinds.

You can download – I did – Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium), published 2013, from this site: w2.vatican.va; I can send you my pdf version if you ask by way of comment. I copied it and reformatted in my favorite app, Word 2013, and found, counting the Table of Contents I generated myself and the citations, the number of words is exactly 51,546. Today, let me tell you about the joy of the gospel of Christ according to Pope Francis, and the joy of the gospel of Word according to Frank H. The joy of the gospel is for those who apply the commandments of God; the joy of creating a book is for those who apply the rules of the app.

While I was working on my Word 2013 format, the better to study and quote from it word-for-word, I noted Pope Francis' joy in writing that book; along with that, I noted my pleasure in discovering that when it comes to manuscripts, the Vatican up to now is working with methods borrowed from the 18th century. I'm writing about that now because I want to help spread the joy of the Gospel, as well as the joy of creating a book so full of citations (Joy of the Gospel has 217) and yet a delight to produce because one has mastered the intricacies of one's app as the man of God has mastered intricacies of the Bible. Based on my editorial experience of almost 40 years, I'm sure Pope Francis' staff had a hell of a time producing his book, and I mean it literally.

Here's the very first paragraph:

The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew. In this Exhortation I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church’s journey in years to come.

"The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus" and practice what he preaches. I have no problem with that because as a writer, blogger, editor, desktop publisher (the person, not the program), I practice with pleasure what I preach. Personally now, Pope Francis' Joy of the Gospel has given me three times the pleasure, because of its multiplier effects:

One, Joy of the Gospel has the multiplier effect everybody wants. Joy as apostolic exhortation actually celebrates our Christianity, not only my Catholicism. Pope Francis spreads the joy. The more joy you spread, the more comes back to you.

Two, Joy of the Gospel multiplies the new directions in understanding and applying the lessons from the gospel, such as "the evangelizing power of popular piety" (par 122) in this generation to the next generation, and "the inclusion of the poor in society" (par 186-192) in development. Popular piety: We find this generation "translating the gift of God into its own life and in accordance with its own genius," enriching the next generation. Inclusion: Inclusive development "presumes the creation of a new mindset which thinks in terms of community and the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few." If you're not Catholic and not pro-poor, you're simply unsympathetic; if you're Catholic and not pro-poor, you're simply pathetic.

Three, Joy of the Gospel multiplies its own citations and in constructing itself, multiplies the energy necessarily spent in producing the book! In other words, it was an extremely difficult book to write and produce with the abundance of crisscrossing (pun intended) texts and references. This is the time when abundance is a burden – if you don't know your app. That's why I want to talk this time about Word 2013, my app. It could have saved the staff of Pope Francis from the slavery of drudgery.

I can see exactly how those 217 bracketed reference numbers were inserted and the corresponding notes constructed as another part of the book, and while it's not a Shakespearean love's labor's lost, it's lost on me why Pope Francis' bookmakers of a staff have not learned modern typography. From the pdf that they produced of Joy of the Gospel, I can see that they are still practicing the art of moveable type, with which you have to move 1000 pieces just to compose 100 lines, no joke. No wonder it took a year to produce Joy of the Gospel! At 51,546 words total, that's less than 1,000 words finalized per week, a slow kind of evangelical work. Why, in this modern world, as the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland would have put it, with thousands of books coming out every day, we have to work twice faster than that just to stay in place!

So now with Pope Francis' new evangelization, I want to evangelize the marketplace of bookmaking by preaching the old virtue of writing and the new virtue of mastering your application software. Your app is apt only if you master it. And I am one who writes, edits, and desktop-publish his own books using virtually only 1 app: Word 2013. (That used to be Word 2002 (Word XP), then Word 2003, then Word 2010). And to meet my own high standards in editing technical papers in science, I have been mastering my app since at least Word 2002, in 2003, when I became the Editor in Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science (PJCS), working on about 500 manuscripts via app, with each paper requiring a lot of citations. At a maximum of 20 sources cited, with PJCS, it was already a lot of work for me checking citation number in the text against the complete citation entry under "Literature Cited" or "References." I know I didn't use automatic numbering either.

In the case of Joy of the Gospel, those 217 references must have caused 217 x 217 headaches because Pope Francis didn't write his draft paragraphs as they neatly appear in the book – he wrote separate paragraphs with separate citations, and it fell on his book staff to connect those lines and numbers again and again as the book progressed and the paragraphs were rewritten or added to. Since the numbering was mechanical, not automatic by app – I can easily tell, seen there, seen that! – the production of the book took almost a year.

They must have forgotten that we bookmakers have been warned before, in Old Testament times:

Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 (New Revised Standard Version)
The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings that are given by one shepherd. Of anything beyond these, my child, beware: Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Inadvertently, the NRSV has just described the making of the book Joy of the Gospel, with much study and weariness of the flesh because of the never-ending typing of the texts, numbering of the citations, checking of the numbers against the list of citations – and doing it all over and over again. 217 times 217 times is not an exaggeration – almost back to biblical times when they had to do everything by hand word for word.

If you don't get what I'm driving at, then you will understand this:

Of the making of books there is no end to joy,
no matter how heavy the citation is,
if you use automatic footnoting,

I'm now rebuilding the manuscript of my soft copy of Joy of the Gospel with automatic footnoting; it's just a matter of cut and paste – the correct numbering appears instantly. Your app will do that for you. I'm working with Word 2013, which everyone knows is not a desktop publishing app, which blissfully ignorant of such knowledge I have been using (including its ancestors) to produce my many books, at least 15 so far. As I reconstruct Joy of the Gospel with those numerous footnotes – just as easily as endnotes if you like – I can show you that the pressure of 217 times 217 citations would have been so much pleasure instead if they did it routinely by app and not manually, mechanically. As writer & editor who is an app user, I forgive them 217 times 217 times, for they knew not what they did. They probably used slave-labor index cards or equivalent. Slavery was invented before Christ by a barbarian, the index card in the 18th century by a scientist; neither is wise. Biblical wisdom must be applied with modern wisdom. The joy of the gospel must first be in the joy of working to prepare the word to spread the gospel.