WASHINGTON (CNS) — As the U.S. bishops’ new communications chief, Helen Osman said one of her concerns will be how the church can use the Internet effectively to communicate with Catholics, especially the post-Vatican II generation.
She said she would like to see the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops become “more of a lead agent in how the church uses the Internet.”
Osman, 46, was named secretary for communications of the USCCB in January. She starts her job Aug. 1.
She noted a recent study on Catholic media use in the U.S. by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University that says half of all Catholics are in the post-Vatican II generation. This includes Catholics born after 1960 and those who have no lived experience of the Second Vatican Council or of the church before the changes the council brought.
Reaching these Catholics is one of the church’s biggest communications challenges, she said.
“They are really post-institution. They don’t turn to the institution for information,” she said. “They want to find information and they use their own standards for what makes news credible.”
At the USCCB Osman will head a department that includes the Office of Media Relations, Publishing, the Office for Film & Broadcasting, the Catholic Communication Campaign and Catholic News Service.
She succeeds Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco, a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., who returned to diocesan ministry after more than a decade in the post.
Currently, Osman is communications director for the Diocese of Austin, Texas, and editor of its diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Spirit. She is also finishing a three-year term as president of the Catholic Press Association.
In discussing the challenge of communicating information to the younger generation of Catholics, Osman used her children as an example.
They are “my own little focus group,” she said. She and her husband, John, have four children. David will be 25 this summer, Katie is 22, Sarah will be 20 in the fall, and her youngest, Laurie, 17, is graduating from high school this spring.
“My children are on the Internet and they use all sorts of different sources,” she said in an interview with CNS. “It’s not that they’re not interested in the church’s positions on modern issues, but they just don’t find them on the Internet.”
“A lot of diocesan Web sites function (as) a resource for diocesan staff — which is good — but there is nothing out there that says to the individual Catholic, ‘Here is a reliable source for what you are dealing with now,'” she said. “If we don’t do this, we’re going to lose this generation.”
One way the church has traditionally communicated with Catholics is through diocesan newspapers, most of which are distributed to registered parishioners. Osman noted that many Catholic young adults may not register in parishes, and so may not get their local Catholic paper, yet they are still active in church programs. She used the university community of Austin as an example.
“They’re going to Mass all the time and being Catholic is very much part of their social life,” she said. “We need to do more talking with them and (get an) understanding of what they are looking for, and we’re going to find out they are going straight to the Internet to get their information.”
“We really have to engage people where they are — that doesn’t mean we go up to the mountain but look at issues that are important to people right now,” she added.
Part of the church’s message is “helping families understand how their faith intersects with their daily life, and I’m not talking about just the obvious stuff, (like) figuring out to have family prayer.”
In life’s most heart-wrenching situations, the church can offer “comfort and solace” but also “guidance,” she added.
Besides the Internet, another focus will be building on the relationship the USCCB has with diocesan communications directors and the editors of the nation’s Catholic newspapers.
“We’re all trying to do the same thing — get the church’s message out there in a credible, articulate, user-friendly way,” she said.
She feels that during the height of the clergy sexual abuse scandal the Catholic press could have been used more effectively to talk about the complexity of the story. It’s “one of the lessons we are still learning,” she said. “We need to tell both the good news and the bad news.”
But as a diocesan communications director, she knows the local secular media often get to a story about the church before the local Catholic paper can and makes herself available to local reporters to help them get their facts straight.
She said her job at the USCCB will be to “help build the bridges” between those who can articulate the Catholic Church’s message well and those who are going to report the message.
“If you can help that happen, you are doing the job,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I am the spokesman but can find the spokesman. … One of my lines in the sand is I don’t want to ever do ‘No comment.’ I don’t think that’s helpful.”
