Blog Tips for the Pope

If you missed NPR's All Things Considered this evening, you missed a great segment about the Pope and Blogging "Give Us This Day Thy Daily Post." It was in response to last weeks previewed release of Benedict's address for World Day of Communications where the pontiff encouraged priests to blog and engage in New Media.

Interestingly enough plenty of priests have preemptively jumped on the New Media bandwagon and some of them have pretty large followings. You can find a [short] list of some of them at the bottom of the post.

The segment included two notable Catholic bloggers, interstingly enough one from a more 'conservative' camp and the other 'liberal;' The Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia) of the magazine First Things and Fr. James Martin, SJ of the magazine America. Thankfully theological partisanship was put aside and it ended up being a pretty humorous bit, especially when Scalia suggested:

"He should have some favourite YouTube videos that he can just slap up there when he's feeling kind of tired. Like the parade scene from Ferris Beuller. Slap that up there and that's a days blogging."

But it wasn't just light hearted, Fr. Martin had a good point when it comes to blogging about comments and specifically commenters:

"I would say there are two kinds of angry people. There are angry people, and then there are religiously angry people. And the religiously angry people tend to be angrier than the angry people."

I know all about comments and commenters, but I still allow them, so bring it.

*** Some Catholic Priests who blog ***

• Fr. Z
• Fr. Longnecker (from Greenville, SC!)
• Fr. Finnegan
• Fr. James Martin, SJ (as well as other Priests at America Magazine)
• Fr. Austin Flemming
• Cardinal Sean O'Malley