ARTICLE: Pope Reaches Out to Cyber Youth With YouTube, Tupac, Podcasts
As a recovering Catholic (lol) I certainly found this post forwarded to me from Frank Baker to be interesting...looks like the Vatican will be hipper than a lot of schools!!
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI, who at 82 still handwrites his speeches rather than use a computer, is tapping YouTube, MySpace and podcasts to lure disenchanted youth into the Church’s fold.
Reaching out to the cyber-faithful, he this year debuted on YouTube, Google Inc.’s video-sharing site, and has a MySpace playlist that includes a rap song by Tupac Shakur. His midnight Christmas Mass next week will be podcast, and for the first time ever a Webcam will broadcast the Pope’s appearances from his apartment window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
“New media will be increasingly important for the Church and the Pope himself has said the Internet is a tool,” Don Paolo Padrini, 36, a priest in the northern Italian village of Stazzano, said in an interview. “It demonstrates the Church isn’t afraid of technology and is keeping up with the times.”
Pope Benedict, who was elected in April 2005, is looking for ways to reach out to the young amid a decline in church attendance and following. Catholics were overtaken for the first time last year by the world’s 1.1 billion Muslims, according to the Vatican Statistical Yearbook. Attendance at Mass in the U.S. fell to 25 percent in 2002 from 75 percent in 1965, according to “Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II” by Kenneth C. Jones.
“The new digital arena, the so-called cyberspace, allows (people) to encounter and to know each other’s traditions and values,” the Pope said in a May speech. It’s for “young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this ‘digital continent,’” he said.
‘Theoblogical’ Revolution
See the remainder of the article at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&sid=aBX2xfyQzmOg
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI, who at 82 still handwrites his speeches rather than use a computer, is tapping YouTube, MySpace and podcasts to lure disenchanted youth into the Church’s fold.
Reaching out to the cyber-faithful, he this year debuted on YouTube, Google Inc.’s video-sharing site, and has a MySpace playlist that includes a rap song by Tupac Shakur. His midnight Christmas Mass next week will be podcast, and for the first time ever a Webcam will broadcast the Pope’s appearances from his apartment window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.
“New media will be increasingly important for the Church and the Pope himself has said the Internet is a tool,” Don Paolo Padrini, 36, a priest in the northern Italian village of Stazzano, said in an interview. “It demonstrates the Church isn’t afraid of technology and is keeping up with the times.”
Pope Benedict, who was elected in April 2005, is looking for ways to reach out to the young amid a decline in church attendance and following. Catholics were overtaken for the first time last year by the world’s 1.1 billion Muslims, according to the Vatican Statistical Yearbook. Attendance at Mass in the U.S. fell to 25 percent in 2002 from 75 percent in 1965, according to “Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church since Vatican II” by Kenneth C. Jones.
“The new digital arena, the so-called cyberspace, allows (people) to encounter and to know each other’s traditions and values,” the Pope said in a May speech. It’s for “young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this ‘digital continent,’” he said.
‘Theoblogical’ Revolution
See the remainder of the article at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&sid=aBX2xfyQzmOg
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