A seminar in communication and identity has shown that the Church is starting to embrace new methods of communication, Mags Gargan reports
More than 300 people from all over the world gathered at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome last week for the 7th Professional Seminar of the School of Church Communication Identity & Dialogue. This was an opportunity for journalists, diocesan communication officers, spokespeople and members of faith organisations to share ideas on communication and the Church. Among the themes that were addressed was the communications response to the sexual abuse crisis, with a very well-received paper delivered by one of our regular contributors Andrew O'Connell, on the Irish experience of crisis communication. However, the outstanding message that most people came away with is that the Church needs to be more present within social media networks to keep up with modern communication.
According to Helen Osman, spokesperson for the bishops' conference in the US, the digital continent (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) is the new mission territory. ''Social media is the third most popular news platform in the world,'' she says. ''News is now portable, personalised and participatory. This should be seen as an opportunity for the Church to get its message across directly without negotiating mainstream media, and an opportunity to speak to young people.''
Jutta Burggraf from the University of Navarra in Spain quoted a 2001 survey which showed that 28 million Americans used the internet to meet their religious and spiritual needs. In 2004 that had risen to 82 million. He says Jesus is a more popular Google search term than politics and the Pope is a more searched term than any of the names of the world's political leaders, while in Italy half a million websites speak of religion and 18,000 of these are devoted to Catholicism. ''This leads to the question of who is in charge of the information being communicated,'' he says. ''There needs to be some sense of quality control because the information in these websites can be cut and pasted into a news story and then they will be seen as facts.''
Brand
Michelle Levy, the founder of Brand Strategy Consulting in New York gave a presentation on the importance of having a clear identity so that the Church can compete with other world-renowned brands. ''The Church is the oldest and most complicated brand,'' she says. ''It is important to know what your brand is and to be able to communicate it in a clear and concise way. Faced with too many options the audience will shut down. If they don't understand something or are not shown something different or better about your organisation, then they will stick with what they have got.''
The bishops' conference in Slovakia has been quite successful in creating its own brand and using new media methods to communicate. As a relatively new conference they had the advantage of starting from a fresh perspective which led to them embracing social media. As well as providing a radio and TV service, the conference website sends out a news update to subscribers, and accredited journalists are provided with information under a news embargo (where information cannot be published until a certain date). The conference communication office has almost completed training a chain of diocesan spokespeople to represent the Church in the media, they have just launched a MP3 (audio/video) service for the media, and for the first time this year they decided to honour three journalists with an award for their work (surely unthinkable in Ireland!). ''It is important to establish a two way relationship with the media, to build trust and confidence,'' says Fr Joseph Kovacik, spokesperson for the conference. ''This means being available 24 hours for them and providing accurate information fast. It also means in return the journalists will warn you tomorrow we have this article, so get ready!''
Initiative
In Australia the bishops' conference launched a new initiative for the Lenten period this year. Twelve Australian bishops agreed to participate in the pilot programme where each week during Lent they would make a video address for the website where they shared their thoughts and reflections on the Sunday Gospels leading to Easter in a very open and personal way. The project, The Reflection, is a free, internet-based resource comprising of six short pre-recorded segments followed by a lectio divina process for the forthcoming Sunday of Lent. They reached an audience of 3,000 users per week from across 26 countries.
In the Netherlands a team of volunteers who wanted to use new media to promote the Faith set up a non-profit organisation called isidorusweb (named after St Isidor the patron saint of the internet). This is a website which operates as a portal to 5,000 other webpages from different parishes and dioceses around the country. It is like a co-op for Catholic websites and they are receiving about 50,000 users a day. As well as being on Twitter and Facebook they have now launched an iphone application, which is believed to be the first of its kind.
''We want to go to where people go and tell them in their own language what it means to be Catholic,'' says one of the creators, Eric Van Den Berg. And the site is not just used by young people, Eric says the oldest person to contact them is 95 and he uses the internet once a week!
Catholic Voices
Catholic Voices is a project to create a bureau of well-informed Catholic speakers able to articulate the Church's positions on major contentious issues in media interviews and public debates.
Although the project is approved by the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, Catholic Voices does not speak officially for the Church, but is a project of the Catholic Union.
''The aim is to train 20 lay Catholics to talk about their faith with the media. They will be authoritative but not official voices,'' says Jack Valero, one of the founders. ''The idea came about after Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry won the televised debate 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world' for the opposition. This made a lot of Catholics angry and a need for good Catholic spokespeople became evident.''
The project received 80 applications in two weeks and 25 volunteers were selected. The volunteers were then taken through briefing papers where they study different topics and familiarise themselves with issues and how to communicate the Church's stance. The plan was to make the volunteers available to the media for the Pope's scheduled visit to Britain in September, but recent issues like the leaked briefing paper on the Pope's visit, has led the media to approach them looking for people who can represent the Catholic point of view, which is something we certainly have a shortage of in Ireland.
Catholics Come Home
CatholicsComeHome.org is a grassroots lay Catholic organisation that produces creative television commercials and websites, and collaborates with dioceses to invite fallen-away Catholics home to the Church.
The project has created three television ads; 'Epic' which communicates the history, beauty and spirituality of the Church; 'Testimonials' shows common stories of why people left the Church and their joy at coming back; 'Movie' has a prodigal son theme as people watch a film reel of their lives.
In the past two years, over 20 million people saw these ads on secular television across 15 dioceses in the United States. In the first two dioceses where these ads aired 100,000 inactive Catholics and converts came home to the Church in a matter of weeks, and retention remains strong. The other 13 dioceses experienced increased Mass attendance by an average of 11%. Inactive Catholics, Protestant converts, even atheists (to the organisers' surprise) are coming home to the Catholic faith.
''Most people who returned had just drifted away from the Church, 10% had divorce issues and thought they were ex-communicated, while 90% said they came back because we invited them,'' says the founder Tom Peterson.
The organisation is invited into a diocese which then funds the campaign through parish collections or through donations from wealthy benefactors, and it has worked out as an investment of just 'two dollars per soul'. The group has presented to Australia twice and has had numerous contacts from Brazil, and Tom says they would be happy to try it in Ireland if they were invited by a diocese.
