Vatican Is Introducing Portal as One-Stop Information Site
 

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is leaping into the world of new media with the introduction this week of a news information portal that Pope Benedict XVI himself may put online with a click.

Vatican officials said on Saturday that Pope Benedict had been following the development of the portal, which will for the first time aggregate information from the Vatican’s various print, online, radio and television media in a one-stop shop for news about the Holy See.

It is the latest effort by the Vatican to bring its evangelizing message to an Internet-using audience and follows its ventures into Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The portal is also a significant step for the 84-year-old pope, who has been bedeviled by communications problems during much of his six-year papacy, many of them the fault of a large Vatican bureaucracy that does not always communicate well internally.

Mishaps include the pope’s 2005 speech about Islam and violence, his recent comments about condoms and H.I.V. that required no fewer than three official Vatican clarifications, and his rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, among others.

The portal, www.news.va, is to be introduced on Wednesday, the 60th anniversary of Pope Benedict’s ordination as a priest and a feast day in the church.

Msgr. Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vatican office that developed the portal and will maintain it, said Pope Benedict may put the site online himself with a click from the Apostolic Palace.

“This is a new way of communicating,” Monsignor Celli said during a preview of the site at the offices of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/bu...ref=technology


Note: Published: June 26, 2011

Wonder if the Pope, will be surfing experience now ;)