VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.
The pope, whose own presence on the Web has grown in recent years, urged priests Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.
And just using e-mail or surfing the Web is often not enough: Priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.
Last year, the Vatican opened a YouTube channel as well as a portal dedicated to the pope. The Pope2You site gives news on the pontiff’s trips and speeches and features a Facebook application that allows users to send postcards with photos of Benedict and excerpts from his messages to their friends.
Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vatican’s social communications office, said young priests would have no trouble following the pope’s message, but, he joked, “those who have a certain age will struggle a bit more.”
