Launching of a new Vatican news website

Benedict XVI officially launched the Vatican news website, www.news.va, on the evening of June 28, 2011.  This portal is here and now available in Italian and English, to which Spanish will be added at the end of the summer, after the World Youth Days organized in Madrid that will take place in mid-August.  French speakers must wait until the end of the year.

The new website, which is not meant to replace the official Vatican website www.vatican.va (see the article, “The new face of the official Vatican website”), will offer Internet viewers “the main print or radio news of the other Vatican media outlets,” Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli declared to the press on the day before the site went online.  Thus it will present news items originating from the Press Office of the Holy See, Vatican Information Service (VIS), Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican Television Center (CTV), the Vatican YouTube channel, and even the missionary news agency Fides.  The social networks (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) are also in place.

The spokesman for the Holy See, Fr. Federico Lombardi, introduced www.news.va as a “window making it possible to enter into the dynamic of the Vatican media”.  “There is in Benedict XVI, but also at the Secretariat of State,” he explained, “a very encouraging awareness, which has grown in recent times, of the importance of a presence in the world of communications as a whole, at the heart of the new media.”  The same tune could be heard from Abp. Celli, in whose opinion “this pope has caused the Vatican communications to make enormous progress.”  The prelate said that he is particularly pleased about the opening of this new news website:  “I think that we are all entering a new dimension of communications of the Holy See.”

For its official launching on June 28, Benedict XVI wrote his first “twit” and sent it via the social network site twitter.com, which allows the user to send brief messages (called “twits”) by Internet, for example.  For this premiere, the Supreme Pontiff composed the following lines:  “Dear friends, I just launched NEWS.VA.  Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ!  With my prayers and blessings.  Benedictus XVI.”  (Sources: apic/imedia - DICI no.238 dated July 16, 2011)

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The new face of the official Vatican website