Tag: CATHOLIC

While some outlets may bash Chicago's St. John Cantius Roman Catholic church for warning its parishioners of Facebook's moral dangers, we won't. After all, the church's clergy didn't forbid Facebook; they just declared that it facilitates vanity and dishonesty (specifically in children), allowing them to concoct their own identities and social realities with less risk of real-world consequence. ...

On May 1st, the Vatican will beatify the late Pope John Paul II -- an event that Catholics will soon be able to follow on Facebook. This week, the church will launch a new page devoted exclusively to the beatification. "This is a beginning, in a simple way, of allowing the pope to interact with the questions of people and allowing people a direct form of access to the pope," Monsignor Paul ...

Ten years ago, the sisters of the Santo Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, Spain decided to get a computer. "It enabled us do things [sic] such as banking online and saved us having to make trips into the city," 54-year-old Sister Maria Jesús Galán recently told the Telegraph. Having taken to the computer perhaps more quickly than most, Sister Maria set about digitizing the archives ...

An iPhone app designed to walk Catholics through the sacrament of confession has drawn criticism from no less an authority than the Vatican. In a statement issued yesterday, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi dismissed any notion that Catholics might be able to use 'Confession: A Roman Catholic app' to completely replace real confession. "One cannot speak in any way of confessing via iPhone," ...

Devout Catholics and Apple devotees can now conduct their sacraments on the go, thanks to a new iPhone app designed to make confessions a little more convenient. 'Confession: A Roman Catholic App' markets itself as "the perfect aid for every penitent." The app provides a step-by-step guide to the confession process, and offers a so-called "personalized examination of conscience for each user," ...

Make up your mind, Pope Benedict XVI. First, you roll out your own YouTube channel and Pope2you online initiative, and call upon your priestly underlings to colonize the blogosphere. Then, you turn around and declare that the Internet's poisoning our feeble, sin-prone minds. And now, you've taken the wind out of our Web-surfing sails, once again. On Saturday, during a Vatican conference on ...

The Catholic Church has lately dived into the digital revolution with an uninhibited enthusiasm, exploring new ways to reach parishioners and potential converts alike. This may be attributable to Pope Benedict XVI, whose digital-ecumenical efforts have included championing the Internet as a way for Catholics to share their faith, establishing the Vatican's YouTube channel and even asking followers ...

Need to conduct Mass? Starting in July, there's an app for that. According to the AP, an Italian priest has created an iPad application that contains the entire missal -- the text used to conduct Mass throughout the liturgical year. The Reverend Paolo Padrini's unnamed free app will launch next month in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. Two years ago, Padrini developed the iPhone app, ...

We bet the priest who cooked up the Vatican's new text-the-Pope program fancies himself a Father Fonzie, of sorts. He knows the kids -- what they "dig" and what "bums them out." The former? Texting. And the latter? Pedophilia. In response to the recent resignation of a German bishop, who has admitted to beating orphans and is facing accusations of pedophilia, the Catholic Church is offering its ...

Pope Benedict XVI (who loves the Internet, but is wishy-washy when it comes to abuse allegations) says that we need to be more critical of the information we get from the Web. The Pontiff recently said at the Italian Bishops' Conference that Net surfers ought to be wary of the "dangers of conformity, of control, of moral and intellectual relativism, which can already be recognized in the decline ...

The Catholic Church may be embroiled in a grotesque child abuse scandal, but the controversy certainly hasn't prevented one ecclesiastical TV station from taking its digital dogma to the third dimension. As NPR reports, Boston's CatholicTV has become the first religious media outlet to openly embrace 3-D technology by directly incorporating it into its pious programming. Upon opening the 3-D ...

Coming this spring: His mother was a virgin. He was the son of God. He died for your sins. And on the third day he was resurrected... In 3-D! That's what a group of monks in Turin, Italy is hoping will entice pilgrims to stop in their book shop and spend some dough on their way to see the Shroud of Turin. In what officials from the Catholic Church have suggested is a crass commercialization ...

Share Aside from the Good Lord, parishioners at a Catholic church in Poland will soon have another seemingly omnipresent being making sure they attend mass: technology. According to Reuters, father Grzegorz Sowa recently installed in his church an electronic fingerprint scanner that keeps track of how often schoolchildren attend mass. If a student attends mass 200 times over a three-year period, ...

Take it from us: surviving in the blog-o-sphere ain't easy. With the seemingly infinite number of online magazines and voices screaming for attention, it truly is a blog-eat-blog world. And now it looks like the streets are getting even rougher and tougher, thanks to a new fat cat on the blogging block: God Almighty. In a message previewing the theme of this May's "World Communications Day," ...

Social networking sites may have finally met their match. The head of the UK Roman Catholic Church Vincent Nichols warns that social networking sites' emphasis on fleeting relationships may leave teens without strong social ties. Archbishop of Westminster Nichols ruffled some feathers when he told the Sunday Telegraph that the Internet and cell phones are "dehumanizing" community life. His ...