Catholics told to 'embrace Twitter and Facebook'

Melbourne, Apr 30 (ANI): Delegates at a Catholic conference have been told that the Catholic Church should embrace online tools such as Twitter and Facebook to deliver its message.

Key speaker Bishop David Walker opened the Australian Catholic Media Congress in Sydney on Monday with a speech detailing how the church can use new media to stay in touch with its followers.

"The new media is not an optional extra, it is a central element in what we need to do in the proclamation of the gospel today," News.com.au quoted Walker as saying.

He spoke about how the interactive nature of social media made it an ideal tool for communicating the gospel and how many young people today expected community leaders to be proficient in new media.

"We need to be faithful to the people to whom we're preaching," he said.

He said in the past the substance of the church's message had been lost on a modern-day audience.

"So often we've found the church in the given age using the symbols and the language of a past age and that gets in the way of communicating the word.

"Whatever we're doing is meant to elicit faith or to deepen our faith in Jesus.

"In using radio and other techniques ... you could sometimes have a reaching out to people but you don't have any contact with the response that they actually make.

"One of the things about the new media is that I think it is meant to be interactive," Walker added. (ANI)