January 26th, 2010, 1:13AM in Networking by Marc LequimeView Comments
The Pope wants God's presence more noteable on the web.
Pope Benedict XVI has a message for the priests of the Catholic Church: ‘We must blog’, the Pope says that they must proclaim the gospel by not just only webcasting, but by blogging and making use of new web communication tools.
The 265th Pope of the Catholic Church is unpredictably a solid advocate of social media. The pope now has a YouTube channel, and six months ago created a Facebook account and created iPhone Apps to expand the reach of the Church’s message.
In his message, the Pope concedes that priests face new challenges due to cultural shifts that have brought the conversation online. Consequently, priests must do more than just take the Word of the Gospel to the web – doing this by creating Facebook and Twitter accounts, and even as much as regular blogging and setting up blog websites for the Church.
Here’s a small passage from the whole message from the Pope:
‘The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.’
We have to give the Pope brownie points for his effort to make the Church more effective in the cyber realm. Even though the Pope is not on twitter, his Pope2You scheme is definitely a step in the right direction. He clearly knows that reaching young believers requires going to the places where they spend most of their time and chat.
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