Catholic church allows worshippers to light candles on the internet

A Catholic church is allowing worshippers to light candles in memory of their loved ones over the internet as it seeks to reach out to a broader community.



The church of Santa Maria Regina Pacis di Ostia, 20 miles from the Vatican offers the novel scheme through its website .
Father Don Ludovico Barbangelo, the church’s priest, said that his idea was “well received by the faithful”, and is “a little gesture that helps lots of people”, particularly “those further away from the church” and “the people who can’t come to mass or those who want to maintain constant contact with us, given that the church isn’t open 24 hours a day.”
The scheme has so far proved popular: nearly 700 candles have been “lit”, including one dedicated to victims of this year’s Abruzzo earthquake and another to a missing person.
However the church believes it can expand his virtual worship still further. “We’ve also downloaded some videos of masses. As for worship by video streaming, we’re thinking about it… we’ll see,” Fr Barbangelo told the Ansa news agency.
His initiative follows a similar expansion into new technology by the Vatican itself. In January this year Pope Benedict XVI encouraged “young Catholic believers” to “bring the witness of their faith to the digital world” and in May, the Vatican established ‘pope2you.net’, allowing worshippers to sign up for Facebook, iPod Touch and iPhone applications to receive messages from the Pontiff.
However, the Pope has also sounded a note of caution over the pervasiveness of the internet in the modern world, warning that “if the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may in fact function to isolate individuals from real social interaction”. (from the Telegraph)

I guess they've got to try anything to stop the rot, so to speak. How many people regularly go to church nowadays, it can't be anything like what it was years ago, and the number's dwindling every year isn't it?

They seem to be embracing new technology in other ways as well, according to the documentary on BBC2 last night. Apparently the Catholic Church has tens of millions of dollars invested in companies that make a significant amount of money from pornography. The old duffer who tried to defend their moral position was quite funny really, I was waiting for him to say something like "but of course we only approve of hard core porn WITHOUT condoms".............