Young Catholics eager to meet Pope online

Young Catholics in India say they are excited about the prospect of interacting with the Pope through a social networking site the Vatican launched recently.

“We are thrilled the Pope is now accessible and available,” says Joannes Rodrigues, an engineering student in Mangalore, southern India. Until now, “the Pope was inaccessible to people like us who had to go through many hierarchies to reach him,” he told UCA News.

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The new Vatican portal, www.Pope2You.net

On May 21, to mark World Communications Day that the Church observed three days later, the Vatican launched a portal that includes Facebook and iPhone applications.

The Vatican´s Pontifical Council for Social Communications manages the www.Pope2You.net portal available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Father Alwyn D´Souza, secretary of the Indian Catholic bishop´s commission for youth, says the Pope´s presence on the new social networking site has excited youths around the world.

The portal is “definitely a fantastic venture to reach out to more youths,” the Indian Church official said.

Youths find the Pope´s presence on the Internet “very appealing” as he is going to places where people can be found, instead of waiting for them to come to him, Father D´Souza said.

Joemon Thomas Vellapolly, vice president of the Indian Catholic Youth Movement that claims around a million members, says his many friends joined Facebook after hearing about the Pope´s presence there. He said his group has discussed with its members how best to make use of the opportunity.

According to Vellapolly, the new Vatican portal is a positive sign of change that will help the youth understand the Church better. He said he still cherishes the text messages the Pope sent to young people during the last World Youth Day, held in Sydney, Australia, last year.

Rodrigues said many Catholic youths do not bother browsing the official Vatican portal or other Church websites but that is likely to change now that they can deal directly with the Pope, he said.

Austin Crasta, a youth who runs an e-group for Konkani-speaking Catholics, said the news that the Pope is available on Facebook motivated him to open an account with the social networking site.

Even the mainstream media found the Vatican attempt to combine religion and technology surprising. “The Hindustan Times” commented on May 27 that such an enterprise would have been dismissed as inappropriate in the past, but now the Church accepts electronic communications as a “fact of life.”

The newspaper found similarities between the Church initiative and those of leading Hindu temples in India, which offer religious services online. Mixing religion and technology allows people to experience religiosity without moving out of their comfort zones, it remarked.