On Monday he spoke to group of bishops and media professionals at the start of the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for Communications, which was held at the Vatican from Monday until Wednesday this week.

Communication is a mission of the Church, he told the group.

"No investment is too high for the diffusion of the Word of God.

"At the same time, every ‘talent' should be well spent, taken advantage of," he said.

"In reality, our strength alone is not enough,".

Francis referenced an address of Pope St. Paul VI in 1964, in which Paul told the Vatican's then-social communications department that "a thought of faith must therefore support the smallness of our humble efforts.

"The more we make ourselves instruments in the hands of God, that is, small and generous, and the more the probability of our efficiency will grow," Paul VI said.

Francis acknowledged since 1964 "the challenges in this area [communications] have grown exponentially and our forces are never enough.

"The challenge to which you are called, as Christians and communicators, is really high. And that is why it is beautiful."

This is the first plenary assembly of the dicastery since its institution in 2015.

Francis said he "rejoices" in the theme chosen for this Assembly: ‘We are members of one another'.

"Your, our strength lies in unity, in being members of one another. Only so we can better respond to the needs of the Church's mission," Francis said in a prepared speech.

Francis also made lengthy impromptu remarks to the assembly, counseling them to have the "signature of testimony" in everything they do.

"If you want to communicate only the truth without goodness and beauty, stop yourselves, do not do it," he warned.

"If you want to communicate a kind of truth, but without involving yourselves, without giving witness to that truth with your very lives, with your very flesh, stop yourselves, do not do it,".

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: AgenSUR

That is of extreme importance, especially when Church leaders are quick to criticize people for taking the pope's words out of context. "Don't believe everything you read in the media; read the pope's words for yourself," officials in the Vatican's Secretariat of State warn.

But too often translations of the pope speeches - originally in Italian or Spanish - are not made available for many days or weeks. Read more

Bishop Paul Tighe, a Vatican culture secretary, says they are finding people on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other all-inclusive, non-denominational digital houses of worship.

Tighe has been in Lisbon for Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference.

Before he left he told USA Today that "We're used to one direction for communications. We're used to a microphone or a pulpit,"

"In digital media you only gain an audience if you engage with people and listen to their questions and are willing to debate with them."

Much of the Catholic Church's strength is "no longer going to come from Rome but from building up capacity at a local level where we can have a more conversational, participatory form of dialogue," Tighe said.

He said that in general the Vatican views social media as a place to reach people who might not ordinarily "tune in" to its various messages.

But it also wants to avoid shoving those messages down peoples' throats. "We are not trying to sell anything or bombard people or manipulate them," he said.

Tighe, who moved from the Vatican's communications office to its culture beat last year, said about 600 people work in the Vatican's communications department, but only half a dozen are devoted to social media, mostly related to managing Pope Francis' popular Twitter account: @Pontifex. That's going to change.

The church is "realigning" the department to focus more on social media, including using analytics tools that can track the reach of its accounts. The Vatican will explore all the social media platforms to see which will make a good fit, Tighe said.

Currently, the church is receiving advice from Instagram, a visual-heavy platform which he said "works quite well" for the church.

Tighe, (born 1958) has been the Adjunct Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture since his appointment on 19 December 2015.

He is the highest-ranking Irishman in the Roman Curia and was consecrated a bishop on 27 February 2016.

He previously served as secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications from 30 November 2007. Before that he was director of the Office for Public Affairs in the Dublin diocese.

Web Summit ran from Monday to Thursday and was attended by 50,000 people from 165 countries.

About 15,000 companies were represented and 7,000 CEOs and business leaders attended

Source

• usatoday.com
• stuff.co.nz
• en.wikipedia.com
• Image: newsflash.org

Pope Francis announced the new secretariat with a motu proprio, promulgated on June 27.

The new dicastery will oversee the all of the Vatican's communications offices, including Vatican Radio, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican Television Centre, the Holy See Press Office, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Vatican Internet Service, the Vatican Typography, the Photograph Service, and the Vatican publishing house.

Pope Francis added these offices "must continue their own activities, in accordance, however, with the indications given by the Secretariat for Communications".

The secretariat will also assume responsibility for the Vatican's website, vatican.va, and the Pope's Twitter account, @pontifex.

Pope Francis acknowledged the rapidly changing digital media environment necessitated a rethinking of the Holy See's information system.

Continue reading

Former chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Chris Patten, will chair the committee.

It will consider a report from a global consulting firm that reviewed Vatican communications, with a view to streamlining and modernising them.

The Vatican currently has nearly a dozen separate communication outlets and offices, many of which operate independently of one another.

The formation of the committee was announced by Cardinal George Pell on July 9.

"The objectives are to adapt the Holy See media to changing media consumption trends, enhance coordination and achieve progressively and sensitively substantial financial savings," he said.

The cardinal said there currently is little or no relation between the Vatican's individual media expenditures and the number of people reached around the world.

There is a clear need to strengthen the Vatican's digital outreach, he said.

The goal is to use resources efficiently to reach the greatest number of people possible.

Continue reading

In both cases - a nuncio to the Dominican Republic and, most recently, an auxiliary bishop in a diocese in southern Peru - it needed police reports and journalists' questions to bring the charges and the Church's response to light.

This is an all too familiar pattern in Western countries where the denial of reality has left the Church to be seen covering up its faults and actually complicit in the crimes once proven. The fallout in a demoralized local Church is another unfortunate outcome.

In any other large organization, protocols and procedures would fall into place immediately to acknowledge such events and what the organization is doing in response. Apparently not so for the Vatican.

Head Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told me in a recent interview that over the last six months his work has intensified for two reasons: In keeping up with a pope who scripts his own actions and talks openly, and the absence of any structure in the Vatican for receiving and then distributing authorized information.

Come something like the standing down of two bishops pending charges and court procedures, and with all the presumption of innocence in the world until conviction, the Vatican media office is paralyzed.

It shouldn't be. Every organization in the world has contingency media plans in times of transition and for unpredictable crisis situations. Not so the Vatican, or so it seems.

The challenge of handling hot-button Catholic issues will only intensify if the first six months of the new papacy are anything to go by.

The pope has already defused one of them - homosexuality - in a single line: "Who am I to judge?" and ended what is now three and a half decades of attacks by Vatican officials on homosexuality as an "intrinsic" evil which is about as bad as you can get in the Vatican lexicon of failures.

Next month, at a meeting of the group of eight cardinals who are to be a sort of kitchen cabinet, Pope Francis has put one of his burning desires and everyone else's hot-buttons front and center: the divorced and remarried in the Catholic Church.

Turned away - which they've done in their millions - divorced and remarried Catholics are punished for the failure of the biggest risk in their lives with ecclesial exclusion and an implicit lifelong negative judgment. Not good enough says Papa Bergoglio.

And there are more difficult issues to come. Women in the Church's ministry, the celibacy of the Latin Rite (Roman) clergy, reform and transparency in the operations of Vatican offices, the role of bishops, bishops' conferences and regional collections of bishops' conferences have all been flagged either by the pope or his new secretary of state, Archbishop Parolin.

All of these have been in the "too hard" basket for more than three decades. One of these with special significance in Asia is also expected to surface in the near future.

For over three decades, the issue of the uniqueness of Christ and Christian revelation in the context of religions whose origins predate Jesus himself has been the subject of censorship and prosecution by Vatican officials to the extent that theologians in Asia are afraid to even ask questions, let alone propose answers.

Those who have tried have been excommunicated (Tissa Balasuriya, later revoked) and condemned (Jacques Dupuis) for mentioning the subject.

Others who have wanted to enter the debate have, as they've told me, been cowed into silence for fear of the wrath of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and its extensive network of spies and reporters throughout the world who "dilate" (to use the technical term) or report miscreants to what was called for 500 years the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition.

Its style of operation has been mortally wounded in the first six months of this papacy and especially in the lengthy interview given by the pope that appeared in 12 languages late last Thursday and was published by UCAN on Friday.

The pope lamented the preoccupation with rules and compliance with minutiae, not to mention liturgical paraphernalia and overdressing by clerics, preferring to focus on what is central to Catholicism - the journey of faith, the Gospel and the Sacraments.

The outstanding issues for reform of the Church are well known and named above. I think we all need to strap ourselves in for a rough ride in the coming months and years. Meanwhile, let's hope that the Vatican's information service can be of more help than it has been in cases like those of the two disgraced bishops in the past six weeks.

• Michael Kelly SJ in ucanews.com
• Published with permission

Michael Kelly SJ is the executive director of the UCAnews

The praise was understandable. After the spate of missteps that have come to define Benedict's nearly eight-year papacy, it seemed that the Vatican might finally be able to get a jump on the 24/7 news cycle rather than always playing defense.

But the focus on the pope's personal entry into social media (the Vatican has a general Twitter feed and Facebook page) is really a subplot to a larger, behind-the-scenes effort by the Roman curia to overhaul the Vatican's notoriously byzantine communications apparatus and head off problems that can't be glossed over by even the most appealing papal tweets.

That restructuring began in earnest this year following incessant criticism — many from Vatican allies — that Rome's hapless messaging was accelerating controversies instead of defusing them.

From Benedict's citation of an inflammatory passage on Islam's Prophet Muhammad in a 2006 speech to his rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop in 2009, the pope had become known for creating gaffes rather than preaching the gospel. Behind Vatican walls the frustration was building.

The push for a communications reboot was given fresh urgency last January, following the infamous "Vatileaks" case in which papal valet Paolo Gabriele — who was convicted in October — secretly passed thousands of sensitive internal memos to the Italian media that portrayed the Vatican as a den of poisonous intrigue.

So how is the overhaul going now that things are settling down?

"It's a work in progress," said Greg Burke, the Fox News reporter who the Vatican hired last summer in an unusually high-profile move. "I'm just aiming for baby steps at this point, trying to get things moving in the right direction. And I think they are." Continue reading

Sources

• Huffington Post
• Image: The Independent