BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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Pope on social networking:
'The virtual is real'
By NICOLE WINFIELD


VATICAN CITY, January 24 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI put Church leaders on notice Thursday, saying social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter aren't a virtual world they can ignore, but rather a very real world they must engage if they want to spread the faith to the next generation.

The 85-year-old Benedict, who tweets in nine languages, used his annual message on social communications to stress the potential of social media for the Church as it struggles to keep followers and attract new ones amid religious apathy, competition from other churches and scandals that have driven the faithful away.

Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Vatican's communications office, cited a 2012 study commissioned by U.S. bishops that found that 53 percent of Americans were unaware of any significant presence of the Catholic Church online. [If they aren't, they're just not looking. And if they're not looking, it's probably because they're not interested. Every diocese in the USA has a website, and hundreds of parishes do. And from any of them, you can link to other Catholic sites (including the Vatican and the USCCB), and so on, as you widen your universe of Catholic sites.

Other studies, Celli said, made clear that the "millennial generation" of people born after 1982 use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube far more than their parents as primary sources of information, entertainment and sharing political views and community issues.

"The digital environment is not a parallel or purely virtual world, but is part of the daily experience of many people, especially the young," Benedict said in his message. "Social networks are the result of human interaction, but for their part they also reshape the dynamics of communication which builds relationships: A considered understanding of this environment is therefore the prerequisite for a significant presence there."

Benedict himself still writes longhand, but he is a superstar online, with 2.5 million Twitter followers, nearly 11,000 of them following his Latin tweets alone. And under his pontificate, the Holy See has greatly increased its presence online, with YouTube channels, papal apps and an online news portal www.news.va that gathers all Vatican information in one place. [At this point in time, the development would have taken place regardless of who was Pope. It's hard to imagine anyone younger than Benedict XVI who would not have approved the Church's engagement in the new media.]

But the digital exposure hasn't come without risk or criticism: In the days after the Vatican announced that Benedict would respond to questions about faith on his first tweets from his @Pontifex handle last month, the Vatican was bombarded with threats of "Twitter bombs" from critics trying to scare the Pope away from the online social forum.

"Leaving would've been a mistake," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, the No. 2 in the Vatican's social communications office. "It wouldn't have been fair to abandon all the people who joyfully welcomed the Pope's message." [As if anyone could have seriously considered giving up the much-hyped project because of scare tactics and other dirty tricks which were to be expected!]

Celli acknowledged that much of the Pope's message this year repeated exhortations from previous years about the need for respectful dialogue online, for users to present themselves authentically and to listen, not just preach.

"At first look it could look like reheated soup," Celli conceded. But he said that sometimes messages need repeating, particularly in the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church. "I don't want to make any particular revelations here, but don't believe that everything that is said is absorbed at the ecclesial level." ['Sometimes messages need repeating"??? Dear Mons. Celli, hasn't that been the point of all Christian preaching from the beginning? The message of Christ must be repeated as often as necessary till it is assimilated and becomes second nature to those who are capable of such genuine conversion, and repeated endlessly anyway because there is always a heart out there that is open to conversion.]

Celli noted, for example, that at a recent Vatican meeting of the world's bishops on spreading the faith, the recommendations submitted for the Church's social communications strategy "could have been written 30 years ago."

"That means that he who is intervening doesn't have the perception of what is happening today, in the sphere of social networking," Celli said. "That's a problem for us."

[But don't be so quick to brush off 'strategies' that have nothing to do with social networking! Perhaps their suggestions were meant to improve intra-Church communications using the more traditional means, like writing, radio and TV, in which, one must say, the Vatican itself has not been setting a sterling example and has lots of room for improvement. Except that now, whatever errors are committed at the level of a primary outlet - OR, RV, Press Office - also become instantaneously amplified by their instant dissemination through all the other new media outlets, apps and gewgaws! Garbage in, garbage out! (Not that all the Vatican output is garbage, but that, other than the Pope's texts, much of it leaves a lot to be desired!) Doesn't Mons. Celli realize that the content of all these various Internet outlets must still be based on that most basic and traditional communications tool - language (written, verbal, or visual) and how it is used?

Go forth and Tweet!
Pope sees web networks
as 'portals of truth'


VATICAN CITY, Januaey 24 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict urged Catholics on Thursday to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to win converts, as he launched his Pontiff said in his 2013 World Communications Day message.

"Unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people," the 85-year old Pope said in a message published on the Vatican's website.

The Holy See has become an increasingly prolific user of social media since it launched its 'new evangelisation' of the developed world, where some congregations have fallen in the wake of growing secularisation and damage to the Church's reputation from a series of sex abuse scandals.

The Pope himself reaches around 2.5 million followers through eight Twitter accounts, including one in Latin.

Belying his traditionalist reputation, the Pope praised connections made online which he said could blossom into true friendships. Online life was not a purely virtual world but "increasingly becoming part of the very fabric of society," he said.

Social networks were also a practical tool that Catholics could use to organize prayer events, the Pope suggested. But he called for reasoned debate and respectful dialogue with those with different beliefs, and cautioned against a tendency towards "heated and divisive voices" and "sensationalism".

The websites were creating a new agora, he added, referring to the gathering spaces that were the centers of public life in ancient Greek cities.

The speech coincided with the launch of 'The Pope App', a downloadable program that streams live footage of the Pontiff's speaking events and Vatican news onto smartphones.

Pope Benedict's embrace of new media responds to the Church's concern that it is invisible on the internet.

The Vatican commissioned a study of internet use and religion prior to the Pope's Twitter debut, which found the majority of U.S. Catholics surveyed were unaware of any significant Church presence online.


[It's going to be some time before we know how this all turns out, but it would have been foolish of the Vatican to ignore the reality [of the digital world. While the Internet facilitates generating virtual reality, up to and including virtual relationships which may be fictional as well as virtual, those who are generating all that cyber-activity are real people, and therefore, potential targets to whom the Word of God cna be announced...

I've reviewed all the papal tweets so far, and I don't know if the specifically Christian messages would say anything to me if I were not Christian to begin with. Of course, the assumption is that most people who would 'follow' the Tweets are Catholic, including perhaps some lapsed ones. Is there a way some papal Tweets, maybe posted daily, could constitute some sort of running catechesis, perhaps drawing from Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, which is structured as a presentation of the articles of faith we profess in the Credo. Not easy, obviously, to reduce those university lecturesto 140 characters per serving, perhaps those responsible for preparing the papal tweets could use the catcheses he has just begun on the Credo in a more systematic, elss random presentation... Note what they chose to tweet from the catechesis on Wednesday:
"Many false idols are held up today. For Christians to be faithful, they can’t be afraid to go against the current." Not exactly a brilliant synthesis, though it is sound generic advice. But it says nothing about the Credo! Could they not have derived a second tweet from the catechesis on the first article of faith, "I believe in God"?

Let us all pray for the intercession of St. Francis de Sales in behalf of the Vatican communications offices, their personnel and their various efforts!