admin archive at Being Frank

Author Archive for The Team

Oct

We hear you

By admin 2 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

This is just a quick note to let you know that we have heard the recent feedback from the team and from the community on the blog, and we are going to make some changes along the lines you’ve suggested.

For those wondering why we have taken our eye off the ball (sorry, can’t help but use that metaphor on the day of the World Cup Final!), a quick explanation: the admin team members have been otherwise distracted over the last 2-3 months with moving to a different country, having another baby, and preparing to get married.

(Those are three separate events for three separate people, mind you. :) )

But we hear you and we’re planning to work with the Being Frank posting team and build up a plan to finish 2011 on a strong note and lead us into a fresh approach to 2012.

In the meantime, thanks for your continued support of our humble blog, and for your patience, and your prayers!

God bless,

The Being Frank Admin Team

Jun

Meet some of our friends

By admin 1 Comment

Categories: Being Frank...

Hi guys,

We hope you’re having a great Thursday and are gearing up for Pentecost this weekend. Happy Birthday Catholic Church :-)

A special shout-out to the people in Palmerston North as you prepare to welcome a new Coadjutor Bishop on Saturday in the person of Bishop-Elect Msgr Charles Drennan. A great occasion for the diocese.

This week’s Thursday post is a public service announcement from Being Frank and Icon Media to introduce (or re-introduce, as the case might be) people to a couple of websites we like and sites on which we offered a little advice and assistance.

The first is See the Holy Land, a website launched by Pat McCarthy, who some of you may remember from his days as editor of NZ Catholic. Since that time, he’s devoted himself to creating a veritable encyclopedia of information on the Holy Land, as the name of his website would suggest. Pat has made several pilgrimages to the Holy Land and See the Holy Land highlights some of the amazing sites one would find on their own pilgrimage. Visit the site by clicking here. If you want to let friends know what the URL is, it’s seetheholyland.net

The second project is Living the Word, a Scripture resource provided by Fr Frank Bird, SM, who is based in the Bay of Islands ministering to several parishes along with a couple of his Marist confreres. Fr Frank provides an easy-to-use document each week with the readings of the coming Sunday as well as a number of thoughts and questions for people to consider. It’s great for individuals, but also can be used in parishes and schools as a group resource to help prepare for Sunday Mass. Click here to visit the site and then tell your friends to visit livingtheword.org.nz

Happy browsing :D

Jun

The hunt continues

By admin Closed

Categories: Being Frank...

Well, we’ve hardly been swatting away interested parties wanting to join the BF team, so the hunt for a new Thursday poster continues. If you have even a vague interest, email us your questions/concerns/reservations and we’ll answer/allay/dismiss them :)

As a result, you have to put up with another post from The Catholic Soapbox and its resident blogger, Gavin Abraham. This post was entitled “I can’t believe I’m blogging on this”

Regards,
Same resident blogger

——-

There has been a topic in the news for the past couple of weeks that has had me shaking my head. And I mean physically shaking my head. On a regular basis. And here I am about to blog on the topic. It pains me so.

But it’s Monday, and sometimes Monday calls for a little light entertainment.

The topic that has been making me cringe is planking. I think it’s got to be one of the most stupid things that’s ever been given as much air time as it has over the past two weeks in New Zealand and longer than that in Australia.

So why am I blogging about it? Well, someone has got to the root of this planking phenomenon. And as with so many things, like education and sound civil law, the Catholic Church is the institution that seems to be responsible.

That’s what The Holy Irritant reckons anyway.

According to Wikipedia, “Planking is the act of lying face down with arms to the sides of the body, in unusual public spaces and photographing it.The term “planking” was coined in Australia and became a fad in 2011. ”

I can in fact confirm that “Planking” has its origins in liturgy. It is an ancient religious act of lying on the floor of the Church during the chanting of the Litany of the Saints. It is also practised by more evangelical groups during prayer sessions. Here is the pictorial evidence of Holy Planking. Can someone please update the Wikipedia entry to reflect this research?

There is much photographic evidence of the Catholics origins of planking, The Holy Irritant demonstrates.

For what it’s worth, I still think planking is stupid.

May

WWJD? He’d be on Facebook

By admin Closed

Categories: Being Frank...

Hi all,

As you would have read a couple of weeks back, we’ve said goodbye to Filia Day after multiple years of enjoying her Thursday posts (and on another day of the week before that). It’s always sad to see one of our team leave, but people move on to bigger and better things. Thanks heaps, Filia.

So, we’re on the lookout for some talented individuals to help fill the void, and also to help us develop a couple of other projects we’re working on. If you’re keen to be part of the Being Frank team, awesome. If you’re interesting in writing for a blog on a semi-regular basis and you fall into one (or both) of the following categories — Catholic mothers and/or converts — we’d love to hear from you as well.

Please email us through the contact page (which has had a couple of technical difficulties in the past), email us at admin at beingfrank dot co dot nz or just post your interest on this comment thread and we’ll be able to contact you that way to start the conversation.

In the meantime, rather than just reading our public service announcement, here’s a post from earlier this week from over on our brother blog, The Catholic Soapbox, authored by Gavin Abraham.

Thanks all and have a great (wet) Thursday

BF Admin

—–

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.

May

Younger men seeking ordination again

By admin 3 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

Marty is on the road, but managed to email us through a post and a link for today.

While on my travels through Europe — and in Rome, in particular — I was struck by the number of younger men I saw who were priests. I could tell they were priests because, well, they looked like priests. You know, with the cassock on or at least wearing their clerical collar. It was nice to see such public displays of their vocation.

And it appears this trend towards younger priests is happening in the United States as well, according to this article on Zenit.

WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 6, 2011 (Zenit.org).- More than half of the ordination class of 2011 in the United States are 25-34 years old, showing a consistent trend of younger men becoming priests.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released the statistics for this year’s class, reporting a five-year trend of increasing numbers of younger ordinands.

Some 333 ordinands were surveyed, out of a total of 480 due to be ordained for dioceses and religious orders this year.

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), a Georgetown University-based research center that conducted the survey, noted that 69% of the class is Caucasian/European American/white, while 15% are Hispanic/Latino and 10% are Asian/Pacific Islander.

The majority of the class has been Catholic since birth, though 8% entered the Church later in life.

Around a third of those being ordained have a relative who is a priest or a religious.

Over half of the class has more than two siblings, with a quarter of those surveyed reporting five or more siblings.

The report noted that 21% of those being ordained participated in a World Youth Day before entering the seminary.

Two men were ordained in Auckland’s Cathedral on Saturday. Let’s hope this trend in the US replicates itself and a lot more young men seek ordination in New Zealand.

May

When in Rome, do as the bloggers do

By admin 1 Comment

Categories: Being Frank...

Marty is on the road — not to be confused with the former blogger On the Road — this week and Internet access has been scarce. So BF Admin is back on deck this afternoon.

One place where Internet access hasn’t been scarce, though, is in Rome, with the Vatican calling together 150 bloggers from around the world for a summit overnight. Priests, religious and lay people gathered for the meeting, which was scheduled to follow the day after Pope John Paul II’s beatification because many of those bloggers would be in Rome anyway. Hundreds more bloggers applied to attend, but space constraints limited the numbers to 150.

Our good friend Fr Roderick Vonhogen was in Rome for the meeting. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald, this Internet thing is a very valuable tool:

The Rev. Roderick Vonhogen, a Dutch blogger and CEO of the http://sqpn.com site, said blogging for Catholic priests is a great way to spread the faith to people who aren’t necessarily looking for it. He says it can be even more effective than sitting in his remote parish celebrating Mass for 200 because he can reach 40,000 people around the world.

“If we just do what we do in our churches, behind closed doors, we will have empty buildings by the end of the day,” he said.

There was some concern expressed that the Vatican might use the meeting as a chance to try to seize some sense of control of the Catholic blogosphere, which Pope Benedict has said — in not so many words — can get a little bit heated and a little bit nasty (not on Being Frank, of course).

That concern was laid to rest by Richard Rouse, one of the organisers of the event hosted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, when talking to the Catholic News Agency.

“No, there’s no way we can control the blogosphere. Actually what we can do is we can harness some of its great power and dynamism in order to further the Christian message, the Gospel message, and it’s important we do that.”

And also by a Vatican bigwig, as the Sydney Morning Herald continued:

Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Vatican’s social communication’s office, told the bloggers of the Vatican’s desire to get to know them better and establish a genuine relationship.

“We’re here for a dialogue, a dialogue that from our side means the conviction of the concrete, important and unique role of your presence in the world of communication,” Celli told the bloggers.

So, the Vatican is a fan of these new-fangled technologies when used in the right way.

In about three months, Being Frank will mark five years as a venue for some robust debate and dialogue. Heck, 44,000+ comments suggests we’re doing something right.

Apr

A growing empire

By admin 33 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

Inkling is on assignment this week and has been given the week off. As always, whenever BF Admin receives an opportunity to post on Being Frank, we use it for shameless self-promotion :D

On this occasion, we’d like to alert Being Frank readers to the latest project that Icon Media — BF’s keeper — has launched. The show is cryptically named “15 Minutes with the Bishop”, and features an interview format with Bishop Patrick Dunn of Auckland. No prizes for guessing how long the show is (roughly).

15 Minutes with the Bishop is a weekly show, with new episodes released each Friday. The inaugural episode went live last Friday, Good Friday, and is available by visiting the website of The 15th Station. On there, you will also find other shows that are part of the network.

The 15th Station, the first show in the franchise, is a monthly show that discusses the big Catholic stories from New Zeland and abroad from the previous month. Catechiwi is another interview style show with a focus on the fundamentals of the Faith. Ignition, launched a couple of months ago, is another educational show, with talks from Catholic events like Hearts Aflame and the Eucharistic Convention serialised over several weeks.

The other non-Being Frank project that Icon Media operates is The Catholic Soapbox, a blog authored by Gavin Abraham, the former editor of NZ Catholic (and Icon director). He writes posts (almost) every day.

We’ve also branched out into book publishing, with the launch earlier this month of “Truly Blessed — My Story”, the autobiography of Bishop Robin Leamy, SM. The book is available from NZ Catholic.

There are more projects in the pipeline, too, so keep an eye our for those in the coming weeks in months. You can follow us on Facebook, where all news is passed along to our friends and supporters.

Here ends the lesson.