An Ad campaign that includes a picture of a church with a velvet rope accompanied by a slogan "Everyone's on the list," will soon be scattered across the diocese.

CBS reports residents are 'chuckling' because the ads look like they could be for a new cool night club.

Another ad in the series reads, "It's never just a selfie", and shows an image of Jesus in the background of a picture of a woman taking a selfie.

Yet another, "His line is always open," shows a smart phone perched on a Bible.

Monsignor Kieran Harrington, Vicar for Communications for Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn calls the ads "relatable".

"We wanted to look and see what is it people understand," he said.

"We really just wanted to be in front of people and kind of knocking at the door saying, ‘listen you are a part of community, we love you, and we want you to be with us' and that is the whole nature of the campaign," he told Fox News.

The Diocese of Brooklyn launched the campaign to remind parishioners they have somewhere to go for the holidays, reaching out to young people with social media and technology.

Reaction among Catholics is mixed.

"I don't know how to call it other than a materialistic hustle, and that's taking away a piece of the message that is part of the reason people come," Charlie Peterson said.

"I think it might be in poor taste," however, "They are talking, and maybe even posting about it," John Michael added.

Monsignor Harrington told Fox News that young people are responding.

An estimated 1.4 million Catholics live in Brooklyn and Queens, but only 250,000 go to mass every week.

"It's a knock on the door to let people know they have a family here that very much wants to see them," Monsignor Harrington said.

Sources

• CBS
• Crux
• Fox News
• Image: Crux

On a recent Monday morning, Clare Harper's cousin sent her a picture of herself for "Selfie Monday" via Snapchat, a texting and image-sharing service that deletes pictures soon after they are sent.

Harper, 18, responded with a selfie of her own, except instead of posing to capture her best angle as her cousin had done, she contorted her face into something between silly and scary.

With the photo she texted, "This is what I think of selfies."

Still in her pajamas and not yet out of bed, Harper was already receiving images from friends.

She was also being given the opportunity to take and share photos of herself.

Selfies, pictures taken of oneself usually with a smartphone and then shared over a social media app, are just what she and her peers do, she says.

They generally don't give it a second thought.

"If you want to have a normal Facebook page, you're going to have pictures of yourself on it," she says.

Anything otherwise would be weird.

She's nonchalant, unassuming.

It's not that there's much pressure to post pictures, she assures. It's just the norm.

On the one hand, having a profile picture helps friends to know they're connecting to the right person on social networking sites.

On the other hand, especially if you're female, that picture had better look good.

"What you look like is what's defining you. It's like you're defined by how pretty you are. This is me because this is what I look like," Harper says. Continue reading

Source

• Meghan Murphy-Gill in U.S.Catholic

Meghan Murphy-Gill is a writer living in Chicago.

We might talk about the ‘me' generation, the addiction to selfies, or the overbearing politician in any of these terms.

But this ignores their important differences, and threatens to flatten out all the interesting contours of the landscape of the self.

The English poet John Milton offer a useful starting point for discussing these notions.

He thought, rightly, that a ‘pious and just honouring of ourselves' was essential to us - ‘the fountainhead whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth'.

Writing in an essay on church government in 1642, he called for sufficient self-respect or self-confidence to fit us for the undertakings that enrich our lives or those of others.

Too little of it, and we would shrink away from things that we might well need to do.

Too much, and we start doing things that we are not actually fit to undertake.

Milton was talking of modest self-confidence, enough to give us courage to face problems and tackle difficulties.

Today we might think of it as having appropriate self-esteem, and it ought to be one aim of a good education.

But here we need to add an Aristotelian caveat.

The root idea behind the concept of esteem is that of an estimate.

In nearly all contexts it is better not to estimate things too highly or too lowly, and it is the same with estimates of the self.

If I estimate myself too highly in most respects, I am likely to head for a fall: literally if, for example, I think I am a better climber or horse-rider than I am, but metaphorically in almost any other respect. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: Yves Herman/Reuters / Aeon

Fr Gabriel Egan took the selfie standing in the pulpit at the Redemptorist church at Mount St Alphonsus in Ireland during a solemn Novena.

It has been seen by more than 200,000 people, after he posted the image on Facebook.

According to the Irish Examiner, Fr Egan said: "It was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing. I got the notion to try a selfie at the Novena.

"It was during a warm-up period about ten minutes beforehand, and I said ‘let's try one together for the fun of it and see how it goes' to the congregation in the church.

"I had my phone in my pocket. Selfies can be quite hard to take at times, but this one came out very well."

Fr Egan explained that Pope Francis encourages clergy to use all forms of technology to spread the Gospel.

"And if that means using something like selfies, which for a lot of people can be fun, it gets the message out," Fr Egan said.

"As well as over 200,000 people seeing it, many have commented to me on it."

While Facebook is seen mostly by young people, Fr Egan said many older people are using the website and are familiar with it.

"I met people at the Novena who saw it and said that it reminded them that the Novena was on," he said. "

Some of the comments on Facebook remarked that the selfie was cool and that it was nice to see the Church using something like that.

Meanwhile, the 2014 Twiplomacy Study has named Pope Francis as the world's most influential Twitter user.

The Pope beat out US President Barack Obama's Twitter account, even though Mr Obama has 43.7 million followers and Francis has 14 million on his nine different language accounts.

But the @BarackObama tweets are only retweeted 1,442 times on average.

By this standard, Pope Francis @Pontifex is by far the most influential with more than 10,000 retweets for every tweet he sends on his Spanish account and 6462 retweets on average on his English account.

Sources

• Irish Examiner
• Examiner.com
• Twiplomacy
• Image: Irish Examiner

The picture appeared on the Facebook page of one of the youngsters, who used it as his profile picture, and was going viral on social media on Saturday.

The picture comes in the same week that the Oxford English Dictionary included the word "selfie" to denote a self-taken photograph on a smartphone.

The young believers were part of a church group from northern Italy who met with the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics on Wednesday and were seen going up to him afterwards to take their photo.

"There is no marketing behind these actions. The Pope clearly likes being with people while his predecessor liked being with books," said Beppe Severgnini, columnist for the Corriere della Sera daily. Continue reading