Just to be clear, the contention isn't that the Catholic Church was destroyed but that it was transformed, and it _was_ transformed. Prior to the Reformation, it was a pan-European political force. Afterwards, it was merely a religion, and thus it has stayed.

And this is an example of transformation catalyzed by new tools, and, critically, the new social expectations supported by those tools. The 'continuity thesis' -- society changes only evolutionarily, and intellectual work remains the same -- is attractive, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Prior to the printing press and the resulting explosion of new forms of expression, there was no distinction made among the learned between fiction and non-fiction, and the rise of science was driven by the abundance and speed of dissemination (and peer review) that the printing press made possible.

It's certainly a coherent point of view to argue that the current changes don't meet that standard -- I've made my best guess, but its an arguable point, and one worth arguing about. It's not a coherent point of view to argue that intellectual work is untransformed by communications tools, because the historical record demonstrates otherwise.

And we're seeing another rise of peer-review here, when the readers of this blog can subject me to scrutiny, which is of course the point of the whole exercise. What I find curious is that the same commenter who understands the value of that prefers Britannica to Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia improves precisely because of the same process at work here, and it is Britannica that has a secretive process.