Vatican official speaks of Church on the Internet

We are always fishing in the aquarium…The majority of fish are outside the aquarium…. It’s absolutely necessary that the Church establish a presence in the digital world.

Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the president of the Pontifical Council on Social Communications and one of the originators of the Pope’s Twitter feed, was the keynote speaker at the Diocese of Brooklyn’s World Communications Day Conference on Thursday.

Other highlights from his presentation.

• The Church is a community of communities. Its use of social media should reflect that.
• The high rate of retweeting of the Pope’s tweets means that the Church is reaching an ever-wider community.
• People no longer pay attention–if they ever did–simply because a church leader is speaking.
• We don’t want a network of wires, but a network of people.
• Unless we engage digital media, we will wind up talking to ourselves.