Monty Python did it, so why not the Pope?
The Vatican announced Friday that it is launching its own YouTube channel according to the Associated Press. With the channel, the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI hope to to broaden and unite the pontiff’s audience and give the the Holy See better control over the pope’s Internet image.
Benedict posted his first video Friday, welcoming viewers to the channel and a “great family that knows no borders” and said he hoped they would “feel involved in this great dialogue of truth.”
For the Vatican, it was the latest effort to keep up to speed with the rapidly changing field of communications and new media. For a 2,000-year-old institution known for being very set in its ways, it was something of a revolution.
At the same time, though, the pope warned he wasn’t embracing virtual communication without some reservation.
In his annual message for the World Day of Communication, Benedict praised as a “gift to humanity” the benefits of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in forging friendships and understanding.
But he also warned that virtual socializing had its risks, saying “obsessive” online networking could isolate people from real social interaction and broaden the digital divide by further marginalizing people.
And he urged producers of new media to ensure the content respected human dignity and the “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality.”
The 81-year-old pope has been extremely wary of new media, warning about what he has called the tendency of entertainment media, in particular, to trivialize sex and promote violence.
But Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vatican’s social communications office, said the pope fully approved of the YouTube channel, saying Benedict was “a man of dialogue” who wanted to engage with people wherever they were.
In that way, he is merely following in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, who avidly used mass media and information technology to get out his message. John Paul oversaw the 1995 launch of the Vatican’s website, www.vatican.va which today includes virtual tours of the Vatican Museums and audio feeds from Vatican Radio.
You can tune into the Vatican’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/vatican.
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