As I’ve written about before, Icon Media — under whose umbrella The Catholic Soapbox takes shelter — was established with the goal of helping spread the message of Christ using all forms of communication, working particularly closely with Catholic agencies, but also willing to help others with similar mindsets.

Catholic organisations and dioceses have taken to new media and social media like Facebook and Twitter with varying degrees of interest, ranging from “What’s Twitter?” to Facebook pages with hundreds or thousands of people who “Like” it on Facebook.

In the US, not surprisingly, there appears to have been a much greater level of engagement. That must be the case in Connecticut, where one of the local newspapers — a secular paper, no less — has done a story on how social media is drawing men to the priesthood.

The Stamford Advocate was the paper on the case:

If you’re the Catholic Church and you’re want to reach out to men and women interested in joining religious life, you might ask yourself a simple question: What would Jesus do?

The answer: He’d start a Facebook page.

Throughout the country, vocations directors for Catholic dioceses are turning to social media websites as a way to reach out to potential candidates for the clergy.

[...]

Increasingly, social media is seen as just one more way to bring potential people of God into the fold. No less than Pope Benedict XVI has acknowledged the importance of sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. In his message for the 45th World Communications Day, issued earlier this year, he called the growing network of social media sites “an integral part of human life.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an official organization of the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S., has its own vocations website, www.foryourvocation.org, which includes a blog and its own Facebook page. Religious leaders ignore the social media boom at their own peril, said Shawn McKnight, executive director for the conference’s consecrated life and vocations section.

“Human beings are developing new means of communicating, and the church has to be there,” he said.

Indeed, the Church has to be where the people are. It is incredibly important to shepherd the sheep who are already in the flock, but it’s also important to find the stray sheep and use whatever means possible — and Twitter and Facebook are the means du jour — to bring them into the fold. If there are 500 million++ regular users on Facebook, it’s hard to find a broader audience to try to capture than that.

And it seems to be having an impact, with 23 per cent of the men likely to be ordained this year in the US saying that online media played a role in their decision to train for the priesthood.

The Church continues to struggle to fully utilise the online opportunities that exist, says Sam Alzheimer, who runs a company that does a lot of online work for Catholic agencies and dioceses in the US.

“In the late 1990s, when there was a rise in the popularity of the Internet, the Catholic church was a little slow on the uptake,” Alzheimer said. “You had dioceses that didn’t have web pages until 2003.”

Today, it’s difficult to convince some dioceses to follow the next wave of technological advancement and jump on the social media bandwagon.

“They’re a little afraid of Facebook,” Alzheimer said. “They’re fearful that people will write mean things about them. I’m trying to allay those fears and convince them that this is a revolution in the way we communicate.”

All sounds pretty familiar to me.