Digital Continent

The Vatican website (one of the oldest domains/websites on the Internet) has been due for an overhaul for some time. Looks like it's finally going to happen! Here's the news, from EWTN:

The director of the Vatican’s website, Msgr. Lucio Adrian Ruiz explained this week in an interview that the site is going through an extensive redesign to improve the Church's evangelization efforts.

The main reason for the redevelopment? Getting the Vatican website in line with Pope Benedict's call to a new evangelization on the 'digital continent.'

How long will this project take? Well, judging by the fact that the Vatican has over 500,000 pages (many, I am sure, not following any set standard of formatting... making migration scripting very tough), it could be a while.

Msgr. Ruiz said the Vatican site receives three million visits per day, with the greatest number of visits coming from the United States, followed by Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, France and China.

He also noted that the site has occasionally been the target of hackers [see an OSC report on one of the recent attacks here] and cyber attacks, but that the staff works closely with Italian online security officials to keep a close eye on their systems.

Just coming off the Catholic New Media Celebration (more info on the CNMC in a blog post here), this is a great step forward for our universal Church. Hopefully we'll see some movement soon!

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?