Social Media

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From Reuters:

VATICAN CITY - For God's sake, blog! Pope Benedict told priests on Saturday, saying they must learn to use new forms of communication to spread the gospel message.

In his message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Communications, the pope, who is 82 and known not to love computers or the Internet, acknowledged priests must make the most of the "rich menu of options" offered by new technology

"Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources — images, videos, animated features, blogs, Web sites — which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis."

Hat tip: The Forum

More sources for the story:

"Pope Benedict XVI urged priests over the weekend to use as many tools as possible to communicate with people, which includes the Internet and—yes—blogging. The Pope, who has been a bit of an Internet cudmudgeon, acknowledged that "the larger digital world represents a great resource for humanity" and said priests should take advantage of the tool before they become outdated."

Ars Technica: Pope: priests should blog, tweet the gospel too

CNET News: Pope asks priests to become more web savvy

The Next Web: Pope tells Priests: Start blogging

Mashable: Pope's Message to Priests: We Must Blog

ABC News: Pope to Priests: Go Forth and Blog

Read the Pope's entire speech for the World Day of Communications.

There is no way to absolutely prevent people from using your organizational names, logos, branding, identity, and other copyrighted materials on social network sites (besides creating groups on every social network under every conceivable organization name, which is impractical).

The best way to combat infringements is to:

1. First, kindly ask the person who made the group to take it down.
2. Second, ask the social network (most of the big ones have this) to take down the group/account, or at least restrict access, by filing a copyright/infringement claim.
   Facebook: Copyright Infringement Policies
   Twitter: File a copyright or DMCA take-down notice
3. (If it comes to this) File a lawsuit against the social media site, or the individual who created the group/account. This is obviously expensive, and unless you've gone through the DMCA claim as stated above, don't expect to get far with this method.

It's a pain, but it's something we will all need to deal with more often these days...

Seen on the Catholic News Service wire, and mentioned on Whispers:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Communications technology keeps changing, but the need to deliver a message with truth and charity is never obsolete, said Italian Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli.

As president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Celli presided over a four-day meeting of cardinals, bishops and Catholic media professionals to discuss -- mainly in small groups -- new pastoral guidelines for church communications.

A recurring theme during the meeting Oct. 26-29 was what constitutes Catholic communications and what, if anything, can be done about those who use the word Catholic to describe themselves while using all sorts of nasty adjectives to describe anyone who doesn't agree with them.

Archbishop Celli said he didn't think a Catholic bloggers' "code of conduct" would accomplish much, especially when what is really needed is a reflection on what it means to communicate.

Upright, ethical communication is a natural result of a sincere desire to share the truth about God, about faith and about the dignity of the human person, he said.

The archbishop said that what Pope Benedict XVI has said about solidarity and development aid goes for communications as well: "Charity needs truth and truth needs charity."

"Anyone speaking publicly as a Catholic has to have those ethical values that are part of a serious, honest form of communication," Archbishop Celli said.

"In the past, the church's educational efforts included helping people decide what they should or should not watch. Now it must also help them decide what they should or should not produce" and put on the Internet, he said.

What I think they're trying to say is that we should not use false or inflammatory... or uncharitable kinds of rhetoric and language in what we produce online. I know of many Catholic bloggers and online personality who have struggled with the task of not only tempering their own uncharitable thoughts and words, but also often having to deal with the uncharitable (and often scathing) words of commenters and social media friends/followers.

How are we spreading the Gospel through our work? And are we doing it for Christ, or for our own good/needs/desires/wants?

From the Catholic News Agency:

Vatican City, Oct 29, 2009 / 11:30 am (CNA) — Addressing the full Pontifical Council for Social Communications today, Benedict XVI urged its members to help communicate the teachings of the Church on the “digital continent” of the ever-changing technological landscape.

Reflecting on the role of social networking and increasingly real-time electronic communication, Pope Benedict XVI said on Thursday that "modern culture is established, even before its content, in the very fact of the existence of new forms of communication that use new languages; they use new technologies and create new psychological attitudes.”

"Effectively," he continued, the advent of new technology “supposes a challenge for the Church, which is called to announce the Gospel to persons in the third millennium, maintaining its content unaltered but making it understandable.”

Quoting John Paul II's encyclical "Redemptoris Missio" that affirms: "Involvement in the mass media, however, is not meant merely to strengthen the preaching of the Gospel. There is a deeper reality involved here: since the very evangelization of modern culture depends to a great extent on the influence of the media.”

“It is not enough to use the media simply to spread the Christian message and the Church's authentic teaching. It is also necessary to integrate that message into the 'new culture' created by modern communications," the Holy Father asserted. Continue reading [CNA] »

So, what are we doing to "spread the Christian message and the Church's authentic teaching? And, beyond that, how are we, as the Holy Father suggests, integrating our faith and the love of Christ into our (and others') online lives?

There truly is a 'digital continent,' and it is the 'new world' of our century. Can we venture out with the other explorers and evangelize to the inhabitants of this new world in an effective, loving way, as did the missionaries of years past, who risked their very lives to spread the faith?

I have seen many great examples of this happening - personalities such as Matthew Warner, Patrick Madrid, and Jeff Miller come to mind (along with a plethora of others), but what more can we do? How can we bring more people outside the Catholic blogosphere (and podcast-osphere) into the faith?