Fostering connections, Discerning directions through the Internet

Every now and then I come across tidbits of information that convince me of the importance of blogging about being a Sister of St. Joseph in today’s world. A message came into my email box from the National Religious Vocation Conference [NRVC]. The letter gives some statistics about NRVC’s Vocation Match website.

Here’s what it says about women and men using the internet to learn about religious life:

• Continued jump in interest in religious vocations attributed to desire for deeper spirituality and easier access to information via the Internet. Personal contact—real and virtual—essential Personal contact with a religious priest, sister, or brother continues to be the most helpful source of vocation information, considered essential or very important by 82 percent of discerners. Ranking next in importance is a community’s website, with more than 70 percent rating it important or very important in gathering information about a community. In what will surely be a growing trend in our YouTube culture, several discerners even remarked on the helpfulness of videos on vocation websites. “Come and See” weekends and discernment retreats followed a close third in order of importance. Spiritual directors and vocation-related websites also ranked high in importance with more than 60 percent saying they found these resources very helpful.

Earlier this month there was an article in NCR that spoke about “The God Given desire for connection”. You can view the whole article at by following the link

Here’s part of the article.

• In the Internet's early days, critics -- many of them church folks -- assumed that online relationships were, at best, second-rate. At worst, they could be dangerous, luring people into fake intimacy with disingenuous strangers far away and tempting them to ignore relationships with people sitting right next to them. You know, real people. Sometimes cyber-relationships evolve into real-life ones. Almost everyone knows a married couple who met online. And sometimes real-life friendships turn into online ones, when friends move across the state, country or world. Or online communication supplements real-life relationships, helping friends who live nearby keep in touch more often than is possible with in-person visits or phone conversations.

I really appreciate what says about the how the Pope Benedict is preparing for World Communications Day which is comes at the end of May.

• Even the surprisingly technology-savvy Pope Benedict XVI (who reportedly has an iPod) has jumped on the online bandwagon with his own video blog on YouTube (youtube.com/user/vaticanit). In January, Benedict released a message praising the Internet for the opportunities it gives us to satisfy our God-given desire for connection.
  "Young people, in particular, have grasped the enormous capacity of the new media to foster connectedness, communication and understanding between individuals and communities, and they are turning to them as means of communicating with existing friends, of meeting new friends, of forming communities and networks, of seeking information and news, and of sharing ideas and opinions," the pope writes in "New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a Culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship."
  But Benedict also warns of the possibility of shallow cyber-friends trivializing the true experience of friendship or of online obsessions interfering in our real-life relationships.

I looked for a website that would have more information about this message of the pope. You can go to the Vatican Website. The Catholic church in England also has a page with good links to the Pope’s YouTube page and the full text of his World Communication Day Message.

A lot of people are so fearful of using a public forum like a blog or YouTube video. But there are lots of good uses for these emerging technologies and they are worth exploring.