St. Paul would do this

You could call it a Catholic YouTube, but the YouTube folks would probably chase you down and tell you not to call it that. The use of new media and the internet that has so captured and connected folks in online communities has provided a new and promising forum.

LoveToBeCatholic.com has just launched, and you can help it grow. Founder Tom Hall has been working in unique ways to spread the faith with zeal long before I encountered him last year while hosting my radio show. We all see those colored rubber wrist bands on people, started by the Live Strong foundation, that represent different causes depending on the color. Pink, for example, is breast cancer research, and red represents heart disease prevention, among others… Tom contacted me about the purple ones he produced with the inscription “Periucundum est Catholicum Esse”, which he loosely translates for people as “It’s cool to be Catholic!”

Tom teamed up with friends to produce this video sharing site now, and he’s loaded with that same zeal for sharing and now ‘broadcasting faith.’ He says they monitor all content “to assure that videos reflect true Catholic teaching” and hopes parishes and organizations will join this online community to build the forum.

Like I said above, I believe that if St. Paul were here today, he’d be using every available means – including the internet and the air waves – to create and fill a new areopagus, a new forum, for the new evangelization called for by Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict.

When Benedict was Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote quite a bit about that, and with hope. Because in parishes and small communities of faith, Ratzinger wrote, he saw “the seeds of the future of the world.”