The Pontifical Council for Social Communications is streamlining its presence on the Internet with a news portal that aims to gather Vatican media coverage in one place. Council president Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli announced updated plans for the new site last week, Vox Bikol reports. The multimedia portal, he said, will offer news from the Vatican's newspaper, Vatican Radio and the missionary news agency Fides on a single site. According to a report in the March 2 edition of the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano paper, the portal will be launched by Easter (April 24) in English and Italian. A handful of other languages will follow. L'Osservatore Romano reported that the portal is not the only new venture being pursued by the council. In 2010 they updated their own www.pccs.va website to provide greater visibility to news items from the Vatican and the Universal Church. In an effort to reach a wider audience, the council recently brought an Arabic-speaking priest onto its staff. Archbishop Celli called the acquisition of an Arabic speaker particularly important as the Vatican seeks to understand what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa and how it affects the Church. SOURCE Vatican Planning to Launch Online News Portal (Vox Bikol) PHOTO Christoph Wagener (Wikipedia/CC 3.0)