On Asking Mark Shea into your Web Browser as your Personal Blogger

As discussion continue concerning the Mark Shea Event and readers continue to tease apart the Mark of history and the Shea of Faith, Feddie makes a vital point:

All this is fine and dandy, but the question I have for all of you is this: Do you have a personal relationship with Mark Shea? Do you walk with him daily?

I'm glad you mentioned that.

This whole "personal relationship" aspect is one of the many places where the Shea of Faith appears to be informed by other cultic practices borrowed from pre-existent traditions. One source, for instance, suggests that a being named "Andy" was originally thought to seek a "personal relationship" with the devotee. One early hymn reports:

Andy walks with me
Andy talks with me
Andy tells me I am his own!

However, this practice appears to have been co-opted by early Sheavians who grafted onto the more remote and forbidding personality of the Mark of History (always so ready to issue thunderous denunciations of Torture Apologists and Abortionists) the image of the "Good Blogger" who leadeth his readers to funny YouTube videos, who comforteth the confused with Catechism quotes and the afflicted with groaner puns, and seeks, above all, a "personal relationship" through the Holy Sacrament of the Combox.

Of course, we know that comboxes were a common feature of blogging long before the birth of Catholic and Enjoying It. We likewise know that many blogs made use of YouTube, humorous links, and even Catechism citations during the period the Mark of Hisotry was blogging. So much of what Sheavians call "evidence for the existence of Mark Shea" actually demonstrates the exact opposite: that there is virtually *nothing* original to Shea and that the entire cult of "Catholic and Enjoying it" is transparently a derivation that evolved from pre-Sheavian sources and, at best, attributed to the Mark of History a vast number of mythic and legendary qualities he never dreamt of.