And now, the Pope wants you to blog as well, Father…

There’s a cell phone commercial out there that shows a priest or a reverend of some kind holding a phone and saying, “You think we don’t text? We do.”

As a practicing Catholic, I often worry that the church is perpetually behind the times expecting people to come to it – instead of going to them. Well last week on World Communications Day, the Pope posted a message to Priests on the Vatican web site that invited and entreated them to get on line! I believe that the fact that Pope Benedict recognizes the power of the current trend of on line marketing and communications as an aid to the challenges of the clergy in our time is good news for the Church as a whole and for the future of the Church.

This Pope is showing that he knows what the future holds and that the youth the Church so desperately needs to reach is on the web. Couple that with His ability to connect modern technology and biblical teachings – validating the relevancy of one to the other  – is nothing short of inspirational:

The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

A pastoral presence in the world of digital communications, precisely because it brings us into contact with the followers of other religions, non-believers and people of every culture, requires sensitivity to those who do not believe, the disheartened and those who have a deep, unarticulated desire for enduring truth and the absolute. Just as the prophet Isaiah envisioned a house of prayer for all peoples (cf. Is 56:7), can we not see the web as also offering a space – like the “Court of the Gentiles” of the Temple of Jerusalem – for those who have not yet come to know God?

To read the Pope’s entire message Click Here.