There is compelling evidence that during the second century AD, Marcion, Origen, Tertullian and other "Church Fathers" confused the UNWRITTEN, spiritual principle called the New Covenant by the prophet Jeremiah in the Bible (Jeremiah 31:31-34) with the New Testament, a collection or "canon" of WRITTEN materials.

These Christians, their Jewish ancestors, Islamic successors and other bookish believers therefore bear significant, catalytic historical responsibility for the cerebral fossilization or "brain death" that has ensued from that Church Fathers' error, whether committed consciously or unconsciously.

The writings of Cheik Anta Diop, Marshall McLuhan (a devout Roman Catholic), Vilém Flusser, Carl Jung, C.S Lewis and other scribes are also implicated in the improper use of literacy that has dogged the Bible, the Koran, the Hindu scriptures, the Talmud, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the discography of Bob Marley, the juridical opinions of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and other authoritative secular and religious written materials historically.

As the writer of 2 Corinthians 3:6 put it, the letter killeth. And as surely as that assessment is applicable to the Jewish scriptures, which have brought hope light and stability to so many Jews throughout history, it is applicable to all written material.

It is testament to the Yin that can compliment or contaminate the Yang of literacy.

Contrary to the suggestions of News International's Rupert Murdoch, the BBC's Stuart Hall and other prominent traditional media representatives, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other internet based "social media" monopolies have only compounded underlying challenges to human communication. They have not created those challenges. 

Literacy itself is implicated in the academic anxiety, legalism, literalism and related psychosocial tensions and mental health crises in Barbados, Jamaica, India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, Italy and other places.

And Roman Catholicism and other entities that consciously or unconsciously make literacy a definitive measure of civilized, Christian morality are implicated accordingly.

Is there any clearer proof of the lethal capacity of "the letter" than the scourge of priestly pedophilia and similar forms of pedagogical abuse and aggression among some of the brightest readers and writers in Roman Catholicism?  

But a definitive statement from the Vatican acknowledging the second century Church Father's catastrophic idolization of written material could go a long way to tackling the worst legacies of this approximately 1900 year-long pedagogical tragedy.

A definitive statement from the Vatican could curtail the legalistic, literary leeching and bookish bloodsucking that has plagued Christian witness historically.

It could at least curtail, if not end, the deadly, cancerous, carnivorous knowledge consumption that is evoked in the above painting by the nineteenth century French artist William Bouguereau.

Titled "Dante and Virgil", the painting depicts a short scene from Dante's Inferno, set in the eighth circle of Hell, the circle for falsifiers and counterfeiters.