Cool: Benedict XVI surfs the web and uses email!

Or should I say, totally cool:

The president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, shared this week that the Holy Father has an appreciation for new developments in technology and is comfortable surfing the internet and using email.

During an interview with the program “Studio Aperto” on the Italia 1 TV network, Archbishop Celli added, while the Pope doesn't have a personal email address, he “sends his own personal emails. He does! He has great appreciation for new technology.”

The archbishop explained that while the Pope “cannot respond to the millions of messages that arrive in his inbox,” he is committed to “offering his prayers for all who write to him.”

“The internet is an excellent means of communication,” he continued. “We are seeking to be present where the people are, especially the youth.” (CNA)

I wonder if the Pope reads AmP?!

To my knowledge, we still don't have a picture of Pope Benedict using a computer.

John Paul II preferred Dell laptops (with some papal customization, of course):

Totally 1337.

Head of Catholic Church in UK criticizes online communities

And the UK Tech Herald isn't at all happy to hear it:

Breaking with its well-established tradition of remaining respectfully quiet on subjects that reach beyond the Bible, the good old Catholic Church has this week weighed in with its opinions on social networking. Surprisingly, the Church isn’t a fan and probably won’t be delivering bite-sized sermons on Twitter any time soon.

More pointedly, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has said social networking destinations such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo place a focus on forging potentially delicate “transient relationships” that can cause suicidal tendencies when and if they fracture.

The Church also said social networks place far too much emphasis and importance on how many friends a user can amass as opposed to the actual quality of any resulting friendships.

The criticism of social networking, which was offered up by Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols in UK broadsheet The Sunday Telegraph, comes following the suicide of 15-year-old high school student Megan Gillan, who took a fatal overdose of painkillers after being bullied online through Bebo.

The UK Tech Herald makes the (I think somewhat jerky move) of recommending readers join their Twitter and Facebook groups. Disagreeing with the criticism is one thing, but trying to be sneaky about promoting the opposite of what you think the Archbishop is recommending is not a very mature response.

I think Archbishop Nichols has the right sense here - clearly technology can be used for good and bad purposes, and like any tool, must be used prudently. But the tone one uses to criticize these matters is important - and it's also important to be fairly-well informed about the technologies one is criticizing. Other catholics - lay and ordained - have of course embraced technology to do good things online, and goodness knows the internet benefits from our active presence!

My simple rule of thumb is that our online activity should serve our "real" life. If we're spending time on Facebook catching up on what our faraway friends are doing, instead of spending time with the ones who are actual neighbors, that could be a problem, and an imbalance we need to address.

So we should both take the good things that people see in online communities, and the sober advice of our ecclesiastical shepherds, and make an informed judgement call. 

You know, like we should do with anything else (when we have legitimate options).

Required Reading: Abp. Chaput on Media, New & Old

I'm going to break with tradition and not excerpt any of the text because I think you should just click through this link and read the whole thing.

... especially if you spend a good deal of time digesting mainstream and new media (and really, who of us doesn't?). Not a single wasted word!

Listed: Arch/Dioceses on Twitter

We're on a bit of a twitter kick here at AmP. Let's see how many arch/dioceses we can find on it:

• Archdioces of Atlanta, GA (actually their newspaper) - 86 followers
• Archdiocese of Cincinnati, OH (diocesan newspaper) - 135 followers
• Archdiocese of St. Louis, MO (very well executed) - 309 followers
• Archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis (diocesan newspaper) - 1,316 followers
• Archdiocese of Washington, DC (not updated) - 3 followers
• Diocese of Allentown, PA - 60 followers
• Diocese of Arlington, VA + Arlington Catholic Herald - 92 followers, 259 followers
• Diocese of Brownsville, TX - 162 followers
• Diocese of Cleveland, OH (only 3 updates?) - 49 followers
• Diocese of Green Bay, WI + The Green Bay Compass - 90 followers, 153 followers
• Diocese of Hawaii, HI - 202 followers
• Diocese of Madison, WI (c'mon - not following anyone?) - 39 followers
• Diocese of Orlando, FL (really FL Catholic news) - 590 followers
• Diocese of Phoenix, AZ (diocesan newspaper) - 1,472 followers

If I've missed any - please drop me an email or comment. If you work for an arch/diocese, maybe bring it to the attention of your communications director? It's a great way of keeping your flock in the know!

Pro-Life Film Contest awards $2000 in prizes!

When the Susan B. Anthony List (a pro-life organization) sees a good idea ... they run with it:

"When 12 year-old Lia Mills wrote her speech about abortion for a school contest, she had no idea the kind of impact it would have worldwide. Yet after her mother put the speech on YouTube, it garnered over a half a million views! [watch the video here.]

... Now, Lia is challenging other young people to send in their videos and spread the pro-life message. The SBA List wants to provide our nation’s youth with the opportunity to do just that. This new contest will award two winning videos with a $1,000 scholarship and will be featured in a Susan B. Anthony online campaign!"

Okay, American Papist Kids - you have your homework!

Fr. Jenkins Flies to DC: A Tale of Twitter Tech

Last night's posting on Fr. Jenkins' (alleged) covert trip to DC provides me an occasion to ramble about the contribution of new media to the news cycle, and discuss how it augments AmP's role in Catholic news.

Yesterday at 5:21PM EST I received a tip that Fr. Jenkins was in DC for an unannounced visit with Barack Obama. I was told the report came from a reliable (second-hand) source, and that the news would hit the internet "momentarily."

Since I was away from a computer when I received the message, I used my blackberry to update my twitter account (roughly 5:30PM):

"AmericanPapist is hearing a report that ND pres. fr. jenkins is in Washington DC today to meet with Obama?"

30 seconds later I noticed that AmSpec reporter Joseph Lawler had twittered a support to the Jenkins story, based on publicly-available flight information provided by Flight Aware (I know, it's an amazing world we live in).

Happy to provide more information on the report, and still away from computer access, I re-published Joe's notification:

"AmericanPapist RT @josephlawler confirms fr. jenkins in DC to meet with Obama: http://tinyurl.com/deaydg" [RT= Re-Tweet]

... and that's where I had to leave it for the time being, until I had computer access again.

In the hours that ensued, email after email popped into my inbox asking a) if I had heard the rumor, b) requesting me to post the news, c) wondering if I didn't think the story credible and so was ignoring it on purpose or d) all of the above/"I loved today's PPOTD!".

Later in the evening, safely tucked away at home again, I was finally able to post a recap of the Jenkins rumors ... five hours after the rumor hit the Internet pipelines. And so I thought the story was safely put to bed.

I was wrong.

You see, I forgot to check twitter again. Nestled in among my twitter replies, I found - not only people who were picking up Joe's and AmP's reporting, but a second stream of replies claiming that Notre Dame's spokesman was denying the report that Fr. Jenkins had met with Obama in DC.

Thus I had to go back and revise my original blog post, taking into account this new piece of information.

So why do I bring this all up? I think there's (at least one) important lesson here:

Blogging moves fast, but it doesn't move at the speed of news - Twitter does.

That's why I've been bugging AmP readers to subscribe to my twitter feed. I'm not just trying to play a numbers game and see how fast I can break 1,000 AmP followers - I'm trying to help augment the reporting I provide on the American Papist blog.

Blogging, after all, is an amazing way to provide news and commentary on current events (while at the same time remaining open to comment contributions from the community), but it is only one tool among many - including Twitter - that I use to keep Catholics up to speed on things I believe are important or interesting.

That said, you don't have to join Twitter (for that matter, you don't have to read AmP) because I do try to make sure the blogging stands on its own. It just sometimes has to stand a little behind the front of the news line.