blogs

Yesterday the Vatican held its first-ever summit of Catholic bloggers, just a day after the extensive celebration of the Beatification of Pope John Paul II. Many Catholic bloggers from the U.S. attended, and you can view a pretty exhaustive play-by-play in Lisa Hendey's Twitter stream (view the hundreds of tweets from May 1!).

From a report by the Catholic News Service, Richard Rouse said the following on the purpose of the summit:

The Vatican meeting, he said, was not designed as a how-to seminar, and it was not aimed at developing a code of conduct, but rather to acknowledge the role of blogs in modern communications and to start a dialogue between the bloggers and the Vatican.

This is exactly the kind of meta-level view that I think is important to the Church's development of a strong online presence. Many people are too focused on the 'ooh, that's fancy! How do I do that?' way of doing things.

On the Pope's involvement in social media and online communications, Fr. Lombardi had the following to say:

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told the bloggers that while Pope Benedict XVI "is a person who does not Tweet or have a personal blog, he is very attentive and knows well what is happening in the world" and supports Catholic media efforts, as seen by his Good Friday television interview and by his book-length interview with the German writer Peter Seewald.

This is a great model for many of our spiritual leaders to follow; their primary mission is the care of our souls. A person in a sacramental position in the church may, but not must, participate in online communication activities... but never at the forfeit of his mission to care for the souls of God's people—only in support of that mission.

I'm encouraged by what I've heard so far about the summit... but I'm also waiting to hear more personal accounts of the summit, mainly from some of the many American bloggers who attended (Lisa Hendey, again, has a concise list of those who attended in this post).

The Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America conference is attended by over 6,000 teens every year, and there are many parents, friends, and other teens who wish they could participate as well. We have always posted information after the conference, but in St. Louis, for the past two years, we've started live-blogging and posting to social networks frequently throughout the conference, driving up traffic to our OYM websites.

Here are some of the things we've been doing to drive traffic and share information live from the conference.

My setup for the first week... watch a video highlighting the gear » Continue Reading »

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?

I hear from many people involved in Diocesan and organizational work that they are interested in "doing more things online" and "connecting with their members online." it's great to wish for these things, and even better to try to achieve them. But wouldn't it be nice to actually achieve these goals?

It's not the hardest thing to do. And it's not like technology is standing in the way and is extrememly hard to use... But time and time again, I see things done that hinder the Church's ability to truly communicate and connect with it's members online in the best way possible. One such incidence was the start of a new "blog" by Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the Archdiocese of New York's website.

The reason I put "blog" in parentheses is that this so-called blog could be compared to an eight cylinder engine firing on only four pistons; there are many things missing:

• There in no RSS or Atom feed to allow people to subscribe and receive automated updates of new blog posts (though there is a feed for each posts' comments... but seriously, which is more important???).
  • As an aside, once you have a feed, you also need to make sure you integrate it properly so there's not only an easily visible link or button for it on the web page, but it's also appearing in the site's meta tags so people using modern web browsers can subscribe easily in the standard way.
• In the absence of a feed, there is no email list or any other method with which the diocese could "push" updates to the faithful.
• The main page of the blog doesn't even show the content!
• There's no way to promote, rate, or otherwise interact with the content - not even a "post to Twitter" link (though there are comments, so that's a plus).

One positive aspect is that the 'blog' is incorporated into the rest of the Archdiocese of New York's website, so all the Google link power of the archny.org domain exists within the blog posts, something that doesn't happen for many groups who choose to host their blogs elsewhere (the highest profile blog I know of like this is the USCCB Media Blog, hosted on Blogger). Another positive aspect is the fact that the blog pages are well-formatted in terms of their html - using H2, <p>, etc. correctly :-) Continue Reading »