Patron Saint of the Internet

If you think that at the end of the second Christian millennium the Roman Catholic practice of designating a patron saint for various professions has been abandoned, you are wrong.

The church may soon appoint a special guardian for adepts of perhaps the most innovative creation of our times - the Internet and computer science. And the likely candidate was born more than 1400 years before the World Wide Web was created.

At the request of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communication, an organisation called the Internet Observation Services (SOI) carried out an investigation to find the saint who best represents the interests of computer operators and "cybernauts"- addicts of the Internet.

According to the Spanish correspondent of the Latin American and Caribbean Communications Agency, SOI's researchers decided that the most suitable patron saint was one of the church's leading intellectuals, Saint Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in Spain, born in
556.

For many centuries, Isidore has been seen as a man ahead of his time. He wrote a form of dictionary, called Etymologies, with a structure similar to what is now called a database. Like the World Wide Web, Etymologies put at the disposal of its readers massive amounts of
knowledge. An encyclopedia in 20 volumes, it contained information on the seven liberal arts and subjects such as medicine, agriculture, architecture, the books and offices of the church, and other church subjects. It was an extremely popular reference work.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Isidore "had a profound impact upon the culture and educational practice of Western medieval Europe ... His works became a storehouse of knowledge freely utilised by innumerable medieval authors." His influence was
such that many centuries after his death he was declared a "Doctor of the Church", a title reserved for Christianity's intellectual elite.

According to SOI, Isidore also took great pains to bring coherence to his work, to ensure that is was as complete as possible and that all elements were complementary.

SOI also claimed that, like the Internet, the work of Saint Isidore was a bridge between one era and the next. The saint "was ahead of his time and was a cultural bridge between the Ancient World and the Middle Ages". As a result, one of ISO's researchers said, "we feel similar to him as we are also on the dawn of a new stage in history".

Isidore, the researcher added, was one of the principal participants of the church's Fourth Council of Toledo, held in 633. He was deeply interested in the training of clergy and was known for his kindness to the poor.Isidore died in April 636. [455 words]

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