Bishops seek to Net faithful

Roman Catholic bishops in Italy have begun a major media offensive in an attempt to regain lost ground among the country’s faithful.

On Thursday, the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) announced what it called “a pastoral plan for social communications,” warning that the church’s neglect of modern mass media had been a factor in the declining numbers of practicing Catholics. The plan called for a quality leap in the use of mass media as a means of spreading the church’s message.

The 200-page study called “Communications and Mission” amounts to a crash course for bishops in becoming media savvy, with the emphasis on the use of the Internet.

“Social communications are an essential part of the new evangelization,” Bishop Giuseppe Bertori, secretary of the Episcopal Conference, said at a conference introducing the study to the press in Rome.

“In every aspect of the church’s activity, we need to pay more attention to the needs of the media,” Bishop Bertori said.

Rome has been the seat of the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic church, the pope, since the dawn of Christianity, except for a few short interruptions when the pope moved elsewhere. But Italy, though officially a Catholic country, has the one of the smallest groups of practicing faithful in Western Europe. Out of a population of 57 million, 97 percent are baptized as Catholics, but only about 30 percent are regular churchgoers.

The CEI study starts with this reality and sets out a series of measures that Italy’s 270 diocesan archbishops and bishops are instructed to put into effect. The Italian clergy ranges from deeply conservative to very liberal.

The CEI calls its study “a magna carta designed to help the ecclesiastical community with precise points of reference and a clear methodology in the area of communications.”

Every one of Italy’s 25,000 parishes, from the country’s northern borders to the Mediterranean island of Sicily, is expected to set up its own Web site, through which the clergy can maintain contact with its community and vice-versa.

The document stresses that all priests should receive computer training and be familiar with “the language of the new media,” and not just the individuals responsible for the Web sites.

The bishops’ study is critical of mainstream Italian media, which, it says, tend to ignore issue of faith, morals, and religion. Therefore, church leaders need to develop more media of their own, particularly radio and TV stations and newspapers.

One devastating sign of “social and cultural regression is the spread of pornography in much of the media, particularly the new technology,” the study says, and Catholic publications should go on an all-out offensive against it.