The Vatican has taken to the blogosphere - well, kind of.
The Holy See press office announced today that the Vatican Information Service (VIS) launched a blog on April 9th at www.visnews.org in English, French, Spanish and Italian.
The Vatican says the page will be updated daily at around 3pm CET.
It won’t generally contain opinion or analysis but instead offer the daily VIS bulletin, already sent out to subscribers by email for free. This is also available on the Vatican website although it’s not easy to find.
The new blog contains all VIS bulletins going back to 1999 and has some useful links, as well as ones to the Vatican’s Twitter and YouTube pages. Readers can also comments below blog posts and rate whether they are interesting or not.
Although perhaps not revolutionary and not a typical blog page, this is a commendable move by the Vatican as some press releases are not always published in the daily ‘bulletin’ on the Vatican press office website (for example Fr. Lombardi’s reflection on the abuse crisis last week) but they are published by VIS or on the Vatican Radio website.
It might also be a forum through which the Vatican can more effectively counter the unsubstantiated stories, rumours and defamatory articles that can so easily circulate around the worldwide web, and which have recently been directed at the Holy Father.
Today it has published a helpful guide to understanding the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on sexual abuse allegations towards minors.