New media and the priest

Today I have set myself the task of giving a short presentation to the priests of the Bexley Deanery on the subject of "New media and the priest" with reference to Pope Benedict's message for World Communications Day.

The Holy Father mentioned in particular "images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites" so I will select just a few examples of these.

For images, there is the collection at The Work of God's Children's Educational Project that I mentioned the other day, and L'Osservatore Romano's photo site which give resources for priests. The use of images is also well implemented in such videos as "Why I am a Catholic"



This video is by by Katerina Marie Cabello whose blog is Evangelical Catholicism. The video slideshow gives six reasons for being Catholic: 1) the Eucharist, 2) the Church, 3) the Sacraments, 4) Mary, 5) Marriage (actual and spiritual), and 6) Communion of Saints. The song for the video is "Jesus Christ You are my Life," the theme song from the 2005 World Youth Day.

For videos there is also the Vatican's YouTube channel. I was going to show the "Catholics come home" video but it has been pulled from YouTube because of a copyright claim by Catholics Come Home. So now it is an example to show how copyright enforcement gets in the way of the apostolate. As an antidote, there is the excellent Gloria TV for Catholic video sharing.

Blogs? Well I think we know plenty of them...

Websites? Catechetics Online is a favourite of mine which I use regularly to find texts for students in English as well as the incomparable New Advent. The Lenten Reading Plans site I mentioned the other day is a good example of a priest using the internet in the apostolate.

I hope that there will be some enquiries about various possibilities and that the internet connection is robust enough to allow the reasonably speedy display of examples for illustration. I hope to have time to show something of Twitter if only because most people just wonder what on earth it is all about...

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