The goal and vision of our office is to utilize our web site efficiently and to leverage different avenues of social media to reach out to our community and bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to all with an intentional invitation to our parishes and ministries. To coordinate with our other offices, parishes and schools and help bridge, connect, communicate and market content, initiatives, workshops and training opportunities available to our community to encourage active participation.
We also hope to both host and develop resources and training materials to allow parishes as well as individuals foster growth in relationship with Jesus Christ, to be better disciples of Jesus individually as well as to disciple our peers, friends and family better.
"Communication is a means of expressing the missionary vocation of the entire Church; today the social networks are one way to experience this call to discover the beauty of faith, the beauty of encountering Christ. In the area of communications too, we need a Church capable of bringing warmth and of stirring hearts" (Pope Francis' Message for the 48th World Communications Day [WCD], 2014).
Social media is fundamentally changing how people communicate. Our Church can not ignore it; in fact, it is our responsibility as Catholics to bring the Church's teachings into what Pope Benedict XVI called the "digital continent."
As Pope Francis wrote in the 48th World Communications Day message, "The revolution taking place in communications media and in information technologies represents a great and thrilling challenge; may we respond to that challenge with fresh energy and imagination as we seek to share with others the beauty of God."
The Church can use social media to encourage respect, dialogue, and honest relationships—in other words, "true friendship" (Pope Benedict XVI's Message for the 43rd World Communications Day, 2009). To do so requires us to approach social media as a powerful means of evangelization and to consider the Church's role in providing a Christian perspective on digital literacy.