Coming soon: Pope on YouTube
VATICAN CITY -- Puffs of smoke, speeches in Latin and multipage encyclicals have all been used by the Vatican to communicate with the faithful.
Now the pope is trying to broaden his audience by joining the wannabe musicians, college pranksters and water-skiing squirrels on YouTube.
In his inaugural YouTube foray Friday, Benedict welcomed viewers to this "great family that knows no borders" and said he hoped they would "feel involved in this great dialogue of truth."
"Today is a day that writes a new page in history for the Holy See," Vatican Radio said in describing the launch of the site, www.youtube.com/vatican
The Vatican said that with the YouTube channel, it hoped to broaden and unite the pontiff's audience — an estimated 1.4 billion people are online worldwide — while giving the Holy See better control over the pope's Internet image.
The pontiff joins President Barach Obama, who launched an official White House channel on his inauguration day, as well as Queen Elizabeth, who went online with her royal YouTube channel in December 2007.
For the Vatican, it was the latest effort to keep up to speed with the rapidly changing field of communications and new media. For a 2,000-year-old institution known for being very set in its ways, it was something of a revolution.
At the same time, though, the pope warned he wasn't embracing virtual communication without some reservation.
In his annual message for the World Day of Communication, Benedict praised as a "gift to humanity" the benefits of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in forging friendships and understanding.
But he also warned that virtual socializing had its risks, saying "obsessive" online networking could isolate people from real social interaction and broaden the digital divide by further marginalizing people.
And he urged producers of new media to ensure the content respected human dignity and the "goodness and intimacy of human sexuality."
The 81-year-old pope has been extremely wary of new media, warning about what he has called the tendency of entertainment media, in particular, to trivialize sex and promote violence.
