Facebook has only recently started allowing anonymous posts and comments, and several groups I’m a member of are taking it hard. Is it good or bad for the group to let people post without revealing their true names? Not everyone agrees.
The benefits are pretty obvious, especially if it’s the kind of group meant for support and advice. People who post anonymously will frequently open by saying why they’re doing it: because friends or family are in the group, and their situation is private, or often because there’s something they really need to know, but they’re embarrassed to ask. There is a situation they need some insight on, but they’re ashamed that this is their life right now. Or they just need a prayer.
The drawbacks of anonymity are harder to define. Most of the groups I’m in don’t have a problem with people being overtly nasty or threatening while hiding behind anonymity, but the use of anonymity, even for more polite conversation, is still not popular with everybody. Why?
If you are going to be a member of a group—especially a group that explicitly calls itself Catholic—I think it is good spiritual practice to humbly accept other people’s anonymity, if that’s what they choose. It dovetails very nicely with our doctrine of the Communion of Saints: We are all bound together and responsible for one another, even in situations where there is no obvious or immediate reciprocity. Think of it as social asceticism: praying for the intentions of someone whose name you’ll never know; praying for an intention whose details will never be fleshed out, simply because praying is good and we want to be good.
We are supposed to pray not only for the people we’re intimate with, and the people we spend time with, but for the people whose paths happen to cross briefly with ours, and the people whose names we do not know. We are supposed to pray for the dead whose names we’re hearing for the first time, the invisible person being whisked past in an ambulance, people across the ocean, celebrities, apparent nobodies and for our ancestors who died and disappeared long before we were conceived. That’s the deal. That is what we’re supposed to do as members of the body of Christ.
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With thanks to America and Simcha Fisher, where this article originally appeared.
