Tag Archives: new media

Preaching in the World Marketplace

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Today,  24 January 2010, Feast of Saint Francis de Sales and World Communications Day, Pope Benedict XIV urged priests, as he previously urged others in the church, to discover new possibilities in the “new media” for carrying out their ministry of preaching the Word of God. “Church communities have always used the modern media for fostering communication, engagement with society, and, increasingly, for encouraging dialogue at a wider level. Yet the recent, explosive growth and greater social impact of these media make them all the more important for a fruitful priestly ministry. “

For the pope, the new media is an important way of preaching the gospel, especially to the younger generation and to the world beyond the church and he calls on priests “to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.”

There’s a new “agora,” a world marketplace, where Christ must be proclaimed. Get out there.

Bravo.

Passionist Media

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I’ve been involved in the  “New Media” for a number of years now, and I’ve learned a  bit. But it’s a fast moving field and not easy to keep up with.

The New Media comes from the rapid rise of the computer and the growth of the internet in the 1980s. Until then, we used print, radio and television for public communication.

Today, the New Media is found not only in web-sites, blogs, communication tools like e-mail,  Facebook and Twitter, but it’s also transforming the “Old Media” through digital television and online publications.

The New Media is changing the way we communicate.  In the crisis in Iran a few months ago, the government shut down outside television coverage, but the world learned about it anyway,  largely through the New Media.  A shift is taking place in who controls mass communication today and the means to do it. I commented on this in a previous blog.

The New Media tends to be less expensive and less dependent on professionals than the older media. Anyone with a digital camera, a computer and a little know-how can put a video on YouTube or Vimeo. A maze of blogs and websites on the Internet offers a bewildering range of opinions and subjects.

For religious communities like mine, the New Media offers a real opportunity. We are a global community to begin with, and the New Media is global in its outreach. We have a solid spiritual and pastoral tradition and the bazaar of conflicting religious ideas needs some solid religious teachers.

We are branching out from some of our old media ventures to incorporate the new. We have a good province website. The Sunday Mass has a site on the internet.  Compassion Magazine has an online edition. Many of the print publications and videos from Passionist Press can be sampled or seen online.  There are some Passionist blogs around, from the UN and for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of  Creation. A quick look at Google Search, the standard for measuring new media success, says we are still proclaiming the Passion of Jesus.

I was encouraged last Tuesday to see some proposals for our chapter this May involving the new media and the media in general,

I hope we commit ourselves to it.

The New Media

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The Iranian revolution is a fascinating event. It’s opened new ground in communications, for example. The commentators on CNN last night said that the government can hardly control the information available through cell phones, Facebook, Twitter. They‘ve blocked the regular channels, like television and radio, and the journalists who work for them, but a wealth of information comes from ordinary people on the streets.

Today as newspapers fold, magazines like NewsWeek scramble to update their formats, television networks look at declining viewers, the new media is growing. When the host on CNN last night asked his guest communication experts where they would  go to follow the Iranian revolution, they mentioned some blogs that are putting together the emerging story–not CNN itself. I wonder if the CNN host said to himself “There goes my job!”

The 18th century founder of my community, St. Paul of the Cross, was a prolific letter writer. Letter-writing was the rage then, the most popular new form of communication of the time, and he used it to reach a wide range of people.

I think he would blog today. I wish, too, that his community would take more of an interest in the new media. It’s a way to speak to the world.