The Mystical Geek

When I first logged into the web in 1998 (it was through the now discontinued internet cafe of San Jose, Iloilo), what struck me was the paucity of resources for the Catholic faith.  But since that time, a lot more Catholics have been filling up the web with content designed not only for Catholics but also for people who search the truth.  And because we are actually witnessing an explosion of Catholicism on the web, it becomes even more a “Catholic duty” to point out where these sites are found on the web so that other surfers may benefit for them.  Like the beggar who tells another beggar where to find bread, I would be pointing out these other little known Catholic sites for reference.

Let me begin with Cathopologist.COM from where I found out about the other sites I’ll be discussing here in this post.

Cathopologist.COM is a free-blog site that runs on WordPress MU, the multi-user fork of the famous WordPress blog CMS.  This free blog service is still quite new but it has a lot of features that people would appreciate.  The storage allowance is just 20MB but this could be complemented by other free services on the web like Photobucket or ImageShack (for Images), Mediafire or WikiSend (for files you wish others to download).

Cathopologist.COM is an ideal blog site for presenting articles with references to the Scriptures (take your pick: NAB, Vulgate, Greek, Hebrew?) because of plugin created by a Catholic with the handle “Pistos”.  Through the use of this plugin, the Cathopologist blogger does not need to make long quotes of Scriptures and the Catechism in the blog itself, but through references correctly made, the reader needs only to point the mouse and a popup of the referenced citation appears.

This last feature also points to the emergence of Catholics who will be providing other Catholics with tools with which to meet the demands of web evangelization. 

For some time now, we have seen a lot of programming applied to Catholic resource sites.  I have blogged about the Intra-Text concordance of the Bible and the Catechism at the Vatican website.  I have also mentioned the downloadable application given for free by the Congregation for the Clergy.  This latter called the Biblia Clerus allows one to study the Scriptures within the context of the Catholic Church’s two thousand year old faith.

AskACatholic is one of the newer websites that empower Catholics not only to deepen their understanding of the faith but also to help them enter into dialogue with others.  One of its featured pages is the section that contains biblical references for the doctrines of the Catholic faith.  This is a recent trend in the presentation of the Catholic faith.  There was a time when Catholic apologetics was addressed to atheists and non-Christians and so the language employed was philosophical and not Scriptural.  But now that fundamentalism has made itself felt as a threat to Christianity itself (they won’t admit it of course, but these so-called “Christian” groups have done more damage to the cause of evangelization with their bible touting than have the atheists.), Catholic apologetics has also taken up the Scriptural approach, a trait that one can find in Augustine of Hippo.

Finally, there is a website, not really Catholic but filled with Catholic resources that sets itself up as an alternative to YouTube.  This is GodTube.  I spent quite a few hours at the site this morning going through the video clips from EWTN posted there.  With the emergence of GodTube, we are also expecting this year the emergence of Web 2.0 applications out of the World Youth Day  2008 experience.

With these Catholic features of the web, John Paul II’s desire that the web be evangelized is being realized.