archdiocese

There's plenty of posts about this already, which I won't repeat here, instead, read the reports below:

• Archdiocese of St. Louis has a new app - Catholic STL
• Designing and Building Catholic STL

And, straight from the horse's mouth, here's the app's page on the Archdiocesan website.

This iPhone App kind of snuck up on me from under my radar; I was in the middle of two rather large projects in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, when I thought "Hmm... I've wanted to try my hand at an iPhone App for some time. Maybe the time is right!" After a few long nights, a few condensed weekends, and some work hours here and there, I've finished work on what I hope will be an inspirational app.

Not inspirational in the sense that people feel moved to prayer, or feel closer to Christ—no, that's not really the purpose of this app. Rather, inspirational in two ways:

1. In helping people utilize the sacraments.
   The main feature of this app (indeed, it launches straight into it!) is the parish mass/confession/reconciliation time discovery interface. It's so easy to simply find Mass times (or other sacrament times) with this app, that nobody has an excuse for missing Mass if they have an iPhone and are physically able to move about.
2. In getting more (Arch)dioceses on board with new communications initiatives.
   I'm hoping that this will be a benchmark app against which other (arch)dioceses can compare their own efforts in the mobile, 'just-in-time' area. Our parishioners deserve to have the information they need to help them in their faith lives—and they need it in their pockets!

At some point (maybe sooner rather than later), I'd like to open the code, maybe stash it on Github, and help other Catholic organizations make use of it (to whatever extent possible) for their own needs.

I'd also like to have an Android app for the Archdiocese, but so far I've not had the impetus (either from myself or from others) to do so. Read more of my thoughts on Android dev (as it stands now).

Perfect, the app is not. But I'm already tagging and working on a few bugs I've found in the version on the App Store right now, and I'm working on sync so the iPhone will always have the latest parish event time information. You can follow more of that development here.

Do you have any good ideas for further development? Any further integrations you see as necessary? Let me know in the comments!

Want to see what this is all about? If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (this version isn't optimized for iPad yet), download Catholic STL for free.

My prediction: 2011 will be the year of Social Media for the Catholic Church... at least in the United States.

Let's look at some of the latest developments:

• One of the topics for next week's Fall Assembly of the USCCB is "Integrating new media into diocesan communication structures."
• Blogs, Twitter, and other social media outlets are becoming less derivative and dependent on mainstream media, according to a recent Pew report.
• The USCCB recently released a synthesis of social media best practices in its Social Media Guidelines.
• Catholic websites are slowly beginning to integrate more into social media. Catholic news sites are leading the charge, along with high profile bloggers. Dioceses and larger parishes are joining the parade, albeit slowly and begrudgingly at times.

Sadly, there are still very few diocesan-level social media initiatives, but I think this will quickly change in the coming year. There are also relatively few bishops represented online—this is something that may take longer to happen, but it will happen.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the USCCB's discussions on social media.

[Update: Also, check out our list of (Arch)Dioceses on Facebook!]

For some time, I've been looking for a listing of Archdioceses with a presence on Twitter (I follow about 10 or so of them, but I know there are many more. I'm going to post all the ones I know of here, and hopefully people can find others that aren't listed here and post them in the comments below. I'll update this post as more are identified. Here's the list:

Archdioceses

• Archdiocese of Saint Louis, MO - @archstl
• Archdiocese of the Military - @MilArchUSA
• Archdiocese of Washington (D.C.) - @WashArchdiocese
• Archdiocese of New Orleans, LA - @archdioceseofno
• Archdiocese of Baltimore, MD - @archbalt
• Archdiocese of Milwaukee, WI - @archmil
• Archdiocese of Atlanta, GA - @archatl
• Archdiocese of Detroit, MI - @DetroitCatholic
• Archdiocese of Philadelphia, PA - @ArchCommPhila
• Archdiocese of Santa Fe, NM - @ArchSantaFeCBR