Remembering Gerard Serafin

While tidying up the blog today, fixing broken links and adding new ones, I found to my sorrow that the late Gerard Serafin's web page, "A Catholic Page For Lovers," is gone. Someone had maintained it for over a year after his death, but it's now vanished into the ether. His blog is still up, suspended in time.

Gerard was a pioneer of the Catholic internet. His grace, kindliness, good humor, and faith were an oasis in a troll-laden and flame-festing virtual world. He had a deep commitment to the unity of Christians, and founded the Baltimore St. Maximos Chapter of the St. John Chrysostom Society to promote unity and understanding between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. He was the first to realize the potential of a Catholic internet community and began to organize blogs and web-sites in a list he nicknamed "St. Blog's Parish," which name quickly became universal.

Gerard's sprawling website linked (somewhat chaotically) to hundreds of his own pages, each filled with loving reflections, comments, and recommendations, crowded with links and artwork scavenged from the net. Browsing through uncovered treasure after treasure, and caused the reader to marvel that someone could publish on the net so prolifically without the slightest taint of harshness, snarkiness, or denigration, let alone anything approaching flaming. Sometimes, before posting a comment or blog entry, I would click over to Gerard's site, contemplate, and then hit the "delete" key, thankful for having been recalled to myself--or rather, to Christ.