catholic

Since the announcements seem to be making the rounds today, I figured it would be a good time to post this little bit of news to my blog: I'm leaving my position in the Archdiocese of St. Louis to pursue another opportunity!

Starting May 2, I'll be working with a great new team of Catholics for flockNote, a service/website for Catholic parishes and organizations to help register individuals and send them, well, "Notes!"

I've been working for the Archdiocese of St. Louis for almost three years, first in the Catholic Youth Apostolate, and for the last year as the Director of Web Development, and it's been a wonderful experience. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone in the Curia of the Archdiocese of St. Louis for some great professional development, wonderful memories, and for being in a very wonderful and Catholic workplace (we had Mass in the building almost every day that I was working there!).

The image below was taken today (March 19, 2011) at the Church of St. Alphonsus in Rome, Italy. This icon is the original icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and depicts Mary holding the child Jesus, with two angels on either side of them.

A companion app to the Catholic News Live website, my new CNL app has been approved for sale on the iTunes App Store.

You can purchase the CNL app for $0.99 here, or read more about the app (and see some pretty screenshots) on the Catholic News Live website. Catholic News Live delivers the latest Catholic News to your computer and iPhone, and pulls in news from over 50 different Catholic sources, every five minutes.

The App's highlight features are the ability to view news on a world map, and to share news via whatever social media you use. It's a very simple, but very powerful little app that will help you stay in tune with what's going on with the Catholic Church.

I'm happy to announce that my first iPhone App—Catholic STL—has been accepted by Apple for the iTunes App Store, and is available for free starting today!

The Archdiocese of St. Louis also announced the App this morning, and has a 'mobile app' section on the website with screenshots, an introductory video, and more information about the App. The App is free, so what are you waiting for? If you live in St. Louis, or are visiting, go ahead and download it now.

The App basically lets users find parishes and sacrament times/parish information in the first section, read news in the second section, and read and post prayer requests on the Archdiocesan website in the third section.

The St. Louis Review published a 'Living Our Faith' section on Technology and Faith in their most recent newspaper (Feb. 25th issue), and it highlights the fine line between faith and technology.

Two issues I have been thinking about more than others lately are technology as a distraction, and the distance between the Church and mainstream culture in implementing new tech/media initiatives.

To the first, the article reminds the reader, through the words of seminarian Gregory Carl, "Media and technology have a way ofgrabbing up a lot of your time and drawing attention to itself. In a certain sense, our object is to use this means of communication so that in due time, we can set those things aside and be in communion with Christ. There's almost a kind of dichotomy there."

I finally had time to read through a brief article on St. Thomas Aquinas (great patron!) major seminary in Nairobi, Kenya—a seminary with computers disconnected from the Internet, mostly because the $8,000 USD fee to wire the building is outside the limits of the seminary's budget.

I'm guessing the post's author decided to focus on the Internet (or lack thereof) in order to draw readers' attention (I guess it worked, since I'm mentioning the article...), but the best part of the article was in the last paragraph.

Msgr. Francis Blood (director of the Mission Office here in the Archdiocese of St. Louis) asked Cardinal John Njue about what his priorities should be for sending missionary support to Nairobi. Cardinal Njue responds: