Bishop Otto Separi of Aitape connected his reflection with the Synod on the New Evangelization last year in Rome of which he was a member.

Fr. Ben Maepaulo from the diocese of Auki in Solomon Island, but with years of pastoral service in Papua New Guinea as well, explained how this has to meet the concrete local community with its culture as an overall system of meaning.

It has been clearly noted by the Assembly that what makes thing difficult and therefore even more urgent is the fact that we live in a time of cultural transition.

Many components of the traditional Melanesian culture are still there, but regularly challenged by a more individualistic, sophisticated and consumerist modern and global culture.

This impacts in a particular way the individual person and the family. Accompaniment and formation is in great demand along with the renewal of the personal spiritual life.

Nobody is exempt from a new need of evangelisation in changing circumstances beginning with the clergy and the Church leaders.

Cultural traits that are not in accordance with the Gospel need to be overcome: "Teach the new generations - one participant insisted referring to the still widespread belief in sorcery - that sickness is caused by ‘something' not by ‘somebody'.

Continue reading about Assembly

"The eyes of the Vatican are on us," Tagle said in a statement released by his office at the weekend.

The Manila prelate said the Vatican Office of the New Evangelization and the Synod of Bishops are eager to know and experience the activities prepared for the Philippine Conference on New Evangelization, to be held October 16-18 in Manila.

He said the Asian gathering aims to counter "secularist influences" hounding the Church in Asia and to respond to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's call to rediscover and deepen the Catholic faith.

"The challenge was not just to focus on the negatives or the shadows found in the world but also on the opportunities for mission," Tagle said.

He said he hopes delegates will be directed toward the "rediscovery and rejuvenation of their faith, keeping the Church's mission of new evangelization in synch with the modern times."

The Manila meeting will carry a "tripartite objective" of "creating an experience of God in the context of the challenges of the new millennium, strengthening bonds of communion, and providing avenues of inspiration and direction imbued with the spirit of new evangelization."

Dubbed as the "grand climax" of the Year of Faith celebration in Manila, the three-day conference will features talks, workshops, and activities that tackle "modern day approaches to deepen one's faith and spirituality."

Source

UCA News

Image: UCA News

Twitter is a disruptive technology; it challenges, changes and threatens.

Introducing the pope to Twitter was always likely to involve some risk. But, however, we are told the Vatican understands the risk and remains hopeful the involvement on Twitter will work very well.

Even before he sent his first tweet, Benedict had hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, which he acknowledged, thanking his "friends" for their generous response and blessing them from his heart.

The Holy Father normally speaks to people of similar interest, e.g. to smaller hand-chosen groups, to listeners of his homilies, readers of his official documents and to the crowds who choose to join him as he addresses them from his rather remote balcony window.

From 1945 when he entered the seminary, Joseph Ratzinger's world has been the Church and such were his talents, not just the ordinary Church, the high Church, the intellectual Church, the diplomatic Church, the teaching Church. He has lived near and worked in the Vatican for at least 30 years.

@pontifex, Benedict's personal Twitter account, has now put him in direct contact with those in need of God's grace, the "great unwashed." He has joined us in the virtual world and is rubbing shoulders with us as we deal directly with real world issues.

Both favourable and highly offensive comments

From teaching and preaching, and engaging with the diplomatically respectful, Benedict's latest outreach means the remoteness of our world has quickly become proximate to him, and while Benedict was pleased to call his Twitter followers friends, the response he got was rather mixed.

Among the thousands of comments he was,

• told in effect to "go away,"
• confronted about child rape,
• called Satan,
• told no one cares about what he has to say, and
• challenged about the role of women in the Church.

Other responses included remarks expressing strong sexual overtones.

Not all the comments were so pointed,

• he was called a "dude,"
• another said he "friggin' rocked,"
• several people asked serious questions, and
• for the first time, people communicated easily, openly and directly with the pope, several asking him to pray for their specific needs.

Social media is a relatively new phenomenon. We are all learning how best to use it, and it seems things have not gone as smoothly as the Vatican might like.

Initially promising to respond reasonably frequently to some of those using the Twitter hashtag #askpontifex, the pope went quiet on Twitter, I'm told, even causing Marcus Lush on Radio Live to ponder perhaps whether the pontiff was unwell.

However as of Thursday morning the pope is back, but, sadly at this point, @pontifex no longer answers questions, rather just offers inspirational statements.

While getting one's question answered was a bit like winning the lottery, it at least kept a connection with us, his followers. Sadly, at least for now that has gone.

Sadly too for a while, the Vatican or the people at Twitter, seemed to be blocking messages in the conversation thread, and while some of these "conversations" were very offensive, others were more light-hearted. For example,

• Benedict was asked his opinion on the performance of MS Dhoni, the Indian cricket captain.
• Dean Marlett-Smith wanted to know whether in an emergency he might be able to use Twitter's Direct Message facility to get in touch for a quick confession.
• Understanding the pope was new to social media, one follower, Alan Swan, ventured to give the Holy Father some advice on his approach to the new medium, suggesting that he not get too heavy about God, saying that it would make people unfollow him. Instead, he suggested a few cat pictures would be useful.
• One follower also brought up @pontifix on his grammar, saying he thought that when referring to God using the pronoun "his" it more correct to use a capital H.
• Another, got theological and asked, "If God created the sun on the fourth day, how had four days passed?"
• While some 'character' has taken it upon themselves to create an @mrspontifex Twitter account, saying "@pontifex is so hard to buy for a Christmas. He just told me he wants world peace and an end of famine. I've got him socks."
• Responding to the Holy Father's request for any suggestion on how to be more prayerful when we're so busy with the demands of work, families and the world, Gareth Gwynn said, "Mate if you're struggling…."

It is a bold move by the 85-year-old pope and his advisors to move the pontiff beyond the remote Vatican walls into the world of electronic disposable comments.

However the Vatican is not the first institution to have undertaken bold social media campaigns, only to have their initial efforts perhaps backfire.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, manager of social innovation at Twitter, who has been working with the Vatican on its social media strategy, acknowledged the Vatican's concerns and the importance of keeping the pope's persona intact.

"I think people forget some of the ways the Vatican has been innovative over the years. They were great about radio really early on despite many protests from people who said, "The Church shouldn't be on the radio, that's crazy!" Even though there might be some dissent in the Catholic community about whether the pope should be tweeting, I think the Vatican very clearly says yes," Diaz-Ortiz said.

The nature of social media is not one-way delivery but rather engagement, conversation and feedback; and so if @pontifex wants to embrace the new evangelization and outreach effectively in this way, @pontifex has to understand the disruptive nature of the medium and play by the rules.

The pope began using Twitter responding to people's questions asked in Twitter's public timeline, using the hashtag #askpontifex. The sheer number of questions makes it an impossible task to answer all of them, and despite the Vatican's optimism, will @pontifex continue engaging, joining in the conversation?

Here perhaps are a few considerations for the road ahead.

Keep the conversation going

These tentative first steps are likely to have been a mixture of initial excitement and then shock at what has been unleashed. However rather than shutting down the conversation, do the exact opposite.

Rather than simply following himself in other languages, @pontifex could start following others and encourage the Church to participate in and embrace the opportunity.

While recognizing the primacy of @pontifex, the Church is not just one man and encouraging Jesus' disciples to actively participate and join the conversation is surely a positive.

Increase the frequency

There was undoubtedly some shock at the initial feedback and questions @pontifex received. This presents an opportunity to respond with compassion, clarity and understanding.

Rather than decreasing the involvement or reverting to making inspirational statements, increase @pontifex's frequency and involvement in the conversation.

There is no going back. The opportunity is too great. Or as Luke puts, "Put out into the deep and set the nets for a catch" (Luke 5:4).

Answer a person's question directly

When answering questions, there is some confusion about whether @pontifex is asking and then answering his own questions. This prompted one correspondent to call @pontifex a "wee rascal," asking a question "that looked like a question, but really you were just telling us!"

So, when responding to a question, use the normal Twitter convention of responding to the actual question, rather than using the @pontifex persona to do both.

Doing so is more in line with the Twitter convention and makes the question and answer much more authentic.

Tweet for re-tweeting

The Vatican says it hopes people will re-tweet the pope's tweets.

The maximum number of characters in a tweet is 140, so to get maximum value from re-tweets, recommended practice is to respond with 70-80 characters, far fewer than the 140-character maximum.

Learn from others

Finally, if it is the case that the Vatican is not too happy with its first efforts at introducing @pontifex to social media, it is not the first institution to have undertaken bold social media campaigns, only to have their idea perhaps backfire.

The Vatican already has Claire Diaz-Ortiz from Twitter working with them. However it is perhaps also an opportunity to also look outside the Vatican for case studies, where other organizations or businesses have initially floundered in their first attempt at outreach and conversing using social media, and see how they turned things around.

All this said, this step into the world of disposable real-world comments has enormous implications for the Vatican, and it has me pondering once again the significance of Marshall McLuhan's observation, the "medium is the message."

- John Murphy is a Marist priest working in digital media at the Marist Internet Ministry, New Zealand.

An earlier version of this article also appeared in ucanews.com

In his own life lately, Schram says he has been dealing with some heavy stuff, that caused him to wonder what it would be like to have the powers of God, to just fix things by snapping ones fingers, or just tapping a screen!

From there, Schramm went to the idea of "answering prayers" from a screen tap, and after thinking about prayer and doing a few Google searches for it, and he came up with the name "Benediction," which he remembers from his childhood as a blessing, a prayer meant to send people on their way, happy and ready to deal with the world.

It's with this background, that Schramm had his theme for the game. He'd be answering the prayers of supplicants as the player, the App is God with infinite power, answering prayers as needed.

A reviewer at Cult of Mac says the game has three things going for it.

• Benediction is a clean game with a simplicity of purpose
• Secondly, the narrative is of an artist, bringing issues from his own life into his work.
• Finally, there's a progression mechanic in the game. Each game has a limited amount of "god power," which gets used up each tap. The idea is to make your taps, which use up this energy source, clear the most amount of smiley faces as possible, maximizing your score. As you earn points for each game, they add up and can be traded for power ups, also connected to the four different colors in the game, which do some neat things like double your scored points, drop single colors down from the top, or recharge your god power.

Download the App. It's free.

Source: Cult of Mac

"We are deeply convinced that our Catholic Faith in the Lord Jesus is the answer today, for all people, of all ages," said Garrett Johnson, the manager of Catholic Link's new English-language site.

He said the site invites visitors to "discover the truths of the faith that are literally all around them" that speak to them through sports, music, school, friendship or at Church.

"We try to express this through the diversity of subjects, tones, and sources of our videos," said Johnson, who is an American student of philosophy and theology in Rome.

The site collects various streaming videos from sites like YouTube and offers commentaries and interpretations. The site suggests how the videos can be used for Catholic ministry.

Categories include videos about Jesus, the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith, as well as Christian life and family. Other topics include faith and science, pro-life issues, apologetics, recommended movies, music and art, and humorous videos. Continue reading

Image: Catholic Link

Catholic Link's website in English

That same day, half a world away in Bethesda, Md., researchers for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life were telling a gathering of religion writers that two new markers had been reached in the religion landscape in the United States: For the first time since the organization had begun surveying about such matters, the country was no longer majority Protestant, and one in five American adults now claimed no religious affiliation.

Though Catholicism showed no significant drop in overall membership — thanks in large part to the influx of immigrants — we also know that Catholics in the United States have been exiting the church in recent years by the millions, the younger ones before they reach age 18.

For years now "the new evangelization" has been lurking about in search of its own identity, more aspirant than actual in its determination to be relevant and "new." The awkwardness that surrounds discussion of the elusive term was captured in a wire service story depicting the setting and content of the synod's opening address, delivered by Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington.

The church must reach out to former members, showing them both the relevance of the faith "without losing its rootedness in the great living faith tradition of the church," Wuerl said. He was speaking in Latin to a gathering of celibate male clerics. He lamented that too many Catholics don't know basic prayers and teachings and don't understand why it's important to go to Mass and confession. His solution: reach out to them and teach them the contents of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Perhaps that's a plan. But it sounds, instead, as if the analysis and proposed solution are as lifeless and lacking in blood and imagination as the church from which so many are exiting. The new evangelization will remain a stilted and cerebral exercise unless those most invested in its success are willing to take risks. Continue reading

Why Does the Holy Father Need to Call a Synod?

The bishops of the Church, in unity with Peter's successor, and as successors to the apostles, were given a promise by Jesus Christ — I will be with you until the end of time (John 14:16, 26). This promise is given in relationship to the mission entrusted to their care: to teach and baptize all nations (Matthew 28:18-20). When the bishops are assembled by mandate of the pope, amazing things happen. We see this in the Acts of the Apostles, when pastoral questions were raised and answers needed to be given (Acts 15). The apostolic ministry the bishops exercise in the name of Jesus Christ shoulders them with the burdens and joys of shepherding with authority over the flock, with the same love that the Good Shepherd has for the flock — and with the mission to teach and baptize all nations.

We profess our faith in an apostolic Church for a reason. The successors to the apostles, discerning with the ordained and non-ordained the needs of the Church and how to respond to those needs, are the ones who are called to definitively and authentically teach and baptize all nations.

The Synod of Bishops represents a way for the Holy Father to bring bishops together to address matters of the Church in light of the Tradition of the Church and what the word of God has revealed. We should then not look at a synod as a bureaucratic process or a waste of time, but a very important moment in the life of the Church, because the Holy Spirit will bring the bishops the direction, insight and even resolution we need to advance the mission of the Catholic Church. Read more

Sources

• National Catholic Register
• Image: USA Today

In all honesty, at least from a media point of view, it's not even the biggest Vatican event happening right now. That distinction belongs to the trial of Paolo Gabriele, the former papal butler charged with being the mole at the heart of the Vatican leaks scandal. An initial verdict could come as early as Saturday.

Yet the synod is nonetheless worth tracking, especially given the theme. (For those not fluent in Catholic-speak, "evangelization" refers to missionary outreach. We'll get to the "new" part below.) Here are three good reasons why:

• Particularly in places where Catholicism traditionally has been strong, evangelization is a real challenge. In Latin America, the church has sustained massive losses to Pentecostal and evangelical Christianity, estimated at 8,000 defections per day during the 1990s; in the United States, Catholicism has a higher retention rate than other Christian denominations, but a lower recruitment rate, and would be losing ground without Hispanic immigration.
• Synods are always a valuable sounding board for the realities of the church in various parts of the world — sort of a graduate seminar in being part of a global family of faith.
• Synods are also a bit like the Iowa caucuses of Catholicism, a chance for up-and-coming leaders to break out of the crowd, often with one eye on the next papal election.

This synod will run Oct. 7-28. I'll be in Rome for most of that time covering it, so watch the NCR website for regular reports. In the meantime, here's a basic primer. Read more

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Malankara Catholic News

At approximately the same time the Opening Mass for the Synod on the New Evangelisation was being celebrated in St. Peter's in Rome and the doctorates on Hildegard and John of Avila were being promulgated.

Apart from being only the 4^th woman in the history of the church to receive this honour Hildegard was an extraordinary woman. Her life spanned much of the 12^th century being born in Germany in 1098 and dying in 1179. She wrote extensively, composed music which subverted the principles of liturgical music of the time, was a philosopher, ecologist, mystic, Benedictine abbess and visionary.

She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters to people such as Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the reformist Cistercian monastic order. He sent the text of some of her work to Pope Eugenius 111 who endorsed her works and visions, giving her approval to document her visions as revelations from the Holy Spirit.

Her world at that time was in some ways not unlike our own time. There was an atmosphere of fear. New ideas were condemned as heresy. What helped Hildegard navigate through this minefield?

She was a prophet in that she lived immediately before Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Thomas Aquinas and the great Mechtilde of Magdeburg. Perhaps it is providential that she has remained hidden until now so that her impact on our time may be more beneficial, in releasing the spring of new discoveries into exploring God in the Gospel as revealed by Jesus, the Word.

Amazingly at sixty she did the unthinkable for her time. She travelled to cathedrals, churches, abbeys and monasteries preaching. This was at a time when only men preached and women were safely enclosed within monastic walls. What an inspiration for us today!

A Doctor of the Church who can speak the Word of God to all who listen. Catherine Hannan.

• Sister Catherine Hannan is a Home of Compassion sister.

"Those who know little and care even less about the institutions and hierarchies of the church these days" nevertheless are attracted and challenged by Christians whose lives show they have been transformed by their encounter with Christ, said the leader of the Anglican Communion.

Pope Benedict invited Archbishop Williams to deliver a major address at the synod on the new evangelization on Wednesday.

Archbishop Williams recalled the Second Vatican Council, which, he said, was a sign that "the church was strong enough to ask itself some demanding questions."

He told CNS and Vatican Radio that the Second Vatican Council was "enormously important" for other Christians as well as for Catholics.

"I was a teenager as the council began, and a practicing Anglican, and what had been a very self-contained, rather remote, exotic, fascinating, but strange body, suddenly opened up," he said.

In many ways, he said, the synod on new evangelization is a continuation of the work of Vatican II.

"With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow," he said.

"The face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth toward love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look toward that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it," Archbishop Williams told the synod.

During an interview earlier with Catholic News Service and Vatican Radio, the archbishop said: "If evangelization is just rallying the troops or just trying to get people to sign up, something's missing — what's missing is the transformed humanity that the Gospel brings us."

Archbishop Williams, who has announced he will retire at the end of December, also had a private meeting with Pope Benedict.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• Virtue Online
• Image: Clerical Whispers

Some 262 cardinals, bishops and priests gathered in Rome for the meeting, or synod, called to give impetus to the pope's efforts to re-evangelize parts of the world where Catholicism has fallen by the wayside.

The pope said that to evangelize means to help people understand that God himself has responded to their questions, and that his response - the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ - is available to them as well.

"Our role in the new evangelization is to cooperate with God," the pope said. "We can only let people know what God has done."

At the start of the Mass on Sunday, Pope Benedict named two new "doctors" of the church, conferring one of the Catholic Church's highest honors on the 16th-century Spanish preacher, St. John of Avila, and the 12th-century German mystic, St. Hildegard of Bingen.

Cardinal Angelo Amato read aloud the reasons why the church was proclaiming St. John and St. Hildegard doctors, saying their "holiness and eminent doctrine" shine hundreds of years after they lived.

Pope Benedict is particularly fond of Hildegard, who was considered a saint in his native Germany but was never officially proclaimed one by the Vatican. Benedict, who himself referred to Hildegard as a saint, earlier this year passed the decree making her one officially, a requirement for her to be named a church doctor.

The last church doctor named was St. Therese of Lisieux, France, in 1997. The first church doctors were Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great.

The pope has long lamented that in Europe and the Americas, Catholics no longer practice their faith or pass it onto their children. That concern is reflected in the synod's working document that will form the basis of discussion over the next three weeks, a report by the Associated Press said.

"There is a clear link between the crisis in faith and the crisis in marriage," the pope said.

The so-called "new evangelization" is a top priority for Pope Benedict, who routinely laments how cultures in Europe and the West that were once profoundly Christian have become increasingly secular.

The synod coincides with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 church meetings that modernized the church.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, was named by Benedict to run the meeting.

During the opening of the synod, Pope Benedict spoke of the importance of prayer in the church's push for a new evangelization, the meaning of evangelization, and sharing the Gospel through both proclamation and charity.

The pope examined the use of the word "evangelion," the Greek term that is the root of the English word "evangelization," and which is itself translated as "Gospel."

During his homily, Pope Benedict said that the "church exists to evangelize" by sharing the Gospel with people who have never heard of Christ, strengthening the faith of those who already have been baptized and reaching out to those who "have drifted away from the church."

"At various times in history," he said, "divine providence has given birth to a renewed dynamism in the church's evangelizing activity," as happened, for example, with the evangelization of the Americas beginning late in the 15th century.

"Even in our own times, the Holy Spirit has nurtured in the church a new effort to announce the good news," the pope said.

The pope said the synod is dedicated to helping people strengthen their faith and to helping those who have drifted away "encounter the Lord, who alone who fills existence with deep meaning and peace; and to favor the rediscovery of the faith, that source of grace which brings joy and hope to personal, family and social life."

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• AP/Washington Post
• Reuters
• Image: Reuters

"I'm being invited to give some theological reflections on the nature of mission, the nature of evangelization, and I'm extremely honored to be invited to do this," Williams told Vatican Radio.

"I hope that it's a sign that we can work together on evangelization in Europe," the archbishop said.

"It's disastrous if any one church tries to go it alone here and tries to assume that it and it alone has the key," because reviving the Christian faith in Europe requires as many and "as deep resources as we can find."

"One of the hardest, yet most important, lessons the different Christian communities today have to learn is that they cannot live without each other and that no single one of them in isolation possesses the entirety of the Gospel," he said.

In their divisions, Christian communities have developed different spiritual gifts and traditions, which should be shared to build up all communities.

He told Vatican Radio that Anglicans and Roman Catholics "can become so fixated" on issues of authority and church structure "that we can forget the gift of baptism and the gift of one another in baptism," which are the true basis of unity.

The Archbishop's comments came after the recent shared Vespers marking the 1000th anniversary of the Camaldoli monastic community in the church of St Gregory on the Caelian Hill, Rome.

Earlier in the afternoon, Pope Benedict urged Anglicans and Catholics to remember the common roots of the Christianity they share, and said both should renew their commitments to praying and working for Christian unity.

"Christian admonishment is never motivated by a spirit of accusation or recrimination. It is always moved by love and mercy," Benedict said in a Lenten reflection on Twitter.

Sources

• CNS
• Pope2YouVatican
• Image: Agnus Radio

"We know that the Church has lost some of its pizzazz," Dolan said.

"We have to refresh and rekindle that faith."

Pope Benedict chose Dolan to give a keynote address on the new evangelization, a pet project of the Holy Father.

Dolan outlined "a creative strategy of evangelization," calling upon Church leaders to proclaim the faith with clarity and confidence.

"The good news was that triumphalism in the Church was dead. The bad news was that, so was confidence!"

He called for a Church marked by confidence, tempered by humility and the recognition that the faithful, too, need constantly to be evangelised.

"We gather as missionaries, as evangelisers," he told the assembled Cardinals.

The Church, he suggested, needs to sweep out fire and brimstone for a little, for some fun.

Dolan stressed that content is just as important as the medium.

"Instead of the Church being seen as pointing out what's bad all the time, we should point out what's good," he said.

"The Church used to be a place of celebration more than it is today," Dolan said.

"Baptisms, communions, confirmations, weddings — all are cause for celebrations. The church isn't just for funerals."

A day after Dolan's speech, he and 21 others were made cardinals at a consistory ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica. As part of the ceremony they received their "red hat," (Biretta), and gold ring.

Sources

• NY Daily News
• NY Post
• Reuters
• Image: NY Times