#praise!

One can fault the Catholic Church for many things, but ignoring the massive surge in social media usage around the world is not one of them. In recent years, the Church has launched a YouTube Channel, an iPhone app and a web portal all during Benedict XVI’s papacy, as well as urging priests to blog, all as a method of keeping in touch with the times, and their millions of adherents.

This week, the Church begins its annual Lenten cycle, culminating in the holy days associated with Easter in just over a month, and given the flagging interest many young Catholics around the world are apparently showing in sticking to their Lenten vows, the Pope is taking his fight for their pledges to the Twittersphere.

In our increasingly secular societies, many young people no longer keep the Lenten season in any special way – that’s why the Pontifical Council for Social Communications has come up with a new idea to focus hearts and minds on the challenges contained in Pope Benedict’s Lenten message for 2012.

Starting on Ash Wednesday, themes from that papal message will be posted on Twitter each day during Lent and over the coming months other papal speeches and documents are likely to be tweeted in a similar way, hoping to attract the media-savvy generation and entice them to find out more.

That from the official Vatican press release. So, if you follow their Twitter account, you’ll also get your gospel in 140 character increments for the next forty days. Hallelujah! Last year, the saints collectively rolled in their sarcophagi as the Pope himself took to an iPad to drop the following Tweet to launch the Vatican’s Twitter account:

[Source: Mashable]