How cool is this! Fresh on the heels of Monty Python, the Holy See (with a little help from their friends at Vatican Radio and Centro Televisivo Vaticano) has launched its own YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/vaticanit.
AND – streets ahead of L’Osservatore Romano which still has to catch up with the fact that most of the rest of the world DOESN’T speak Italian – there are English, Spanish and German versions of the site also. (English is at: http://www.youtube.com/vatican).
This is the best thing since sliced bread for Catholic bloggers! Here is Pope Benedict on the benefits of the Internet. (My one complaint is that embedding is disabled. Grrr. Copyright issues, I guess…)
“streets ahead of L’Osservatore Romano which still has to catch up with the fact that most of the rest of the world DOESN’T speak Italian – there are English, Spanish and German versions of the site also.”
“If you like your papal announcements hot off the internet and in Italian…”
These are just two of a number of recent comments, Schutzy, where Italian seems to have got your goat. Is there something we ought to know?
Why doesn’t everyone just learn Latin and we can be done with this nationalistic pettiness that has served protestantism (sorry, Catholicism so well) for at least 40 years.
In my parish, the Catholic Church has become a series of mutually exclusive linguistic groups and national churches. Is this really a postive?
Well, I am with you on this one. If they issued all their statements and newspapers in Latin, that would at least make it slightly more comprehensible to me…
The point is that while I am happy to own the moniker “Latin Catholic”, I am not a “Roman” – still less an “Italian” – Catholic. I know that the Pope is bishop of Rome and all, and that Rome is in Italy, and hence it is only right that the Pope’s main language should be Italian, but Italian is not the lingua franca of the Church universal. As long as we are doing things in the vernacular, the Vatican should be making a much, much greater effort to release all its material in the at least the major world languages ASAP. Especially when the main global media agencies are in English.
And in saying that I really do want to acknowledge the huge effort the Vatican Website guys and girls have been doing in recent years. It is simply light years beyond where we were even five years ago. If there had been the current level of communicatoins back in the days of the Second Vatican Council, there would have been a lost less popular misinformation.