AUSTRALIA
The Conversation
Richard Umbers
Lecturer in Ethics & Philosophy at University of Notre Dame Australia
Imagine you were playing with your phone while you waited for the World Cup final to get underway and you suddenly saw a photo of the Pope Emeritus eating popcorn with the current Pontiff on your timeline. Below the photo is a tagline wishing both countries well and a quote from St John Paul II:
Sport … protects the weak and excludes no-one.
In the very near future we may see such a radical reshaping of how we view the Vatican and it will come via the most unlikely of social media champions, Cardinal George Pell, current Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy in the Holy See.
Cognisant that the wireless no longer refers to a radio set, last Wednesday Pell, the former archbishop of Sydney and Melbourne, broadcast a social media thrust for the Vatican by way of a YouTube-streamed interview.
New media to spread the word
You won’t find the tweetless @CardinalPell trolling @RichardDawkins or sending you an invitation to play CandyCrush on Facebook. Pell is, however, a strong backer of initiative and spreading the Gospel message among youth. For that reason he is more than happy to encourage new media despite his own lack of personal interest.
We have seen similar bold moves from Pell in the past. During the 2008 World Youth Day, as Archbishop of Sydney, he launched a major social networking initiative – Christ in the Third Millennium (XT3) – which was touted as the Catholic Facebook.
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