For God’s sake start blogging

POPE Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.

The Pope, whose own presence on the web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.

And just using email or surfing the web is often not enough: priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.

“The spread of multimedia communications and its rich ‘menu of options’ might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the web,” but priests are “challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,” he said.

The pontiff’s message was prepared for the World Day of Communications.