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?
Apparently, the Google Bot is quite happy when your a website offers a constantly updating home page - to the tune of 1,000+ page hits per day! Catholic News Live has received an average of 13,000 page views per week from the Google Bot since it's launch two weeks ago... meaning it has had a field day updating content from the site, and finding stories from Catholic blogs and news sites. It seems the bot checks in at least once an hour.
