Blessed Be the Internet

The Archdiocese of New York, when first contemplating the use of the Internet to expand its reach, discovered there were a number of people inside the church who were skeptical of the emerging technology and fearful of its reputation as an outlet for smut.

"Some people were concerned because they heard the Internet was where you go to get pornography. They didn't really have a grasp of it," says Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the New York Archdiocese and a strong supporter of using the Net to get the church's message out. "The fact is that the church has always used whatever communications media was available to it. In the early days, it was writing down stories. Then came moveable press with The Guttenberg Bible, and radio and television with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheehan. Now, with the Internet, we have a new outlet to reach people where they are. That was one of the most compelling arguments when we were convincing people we needed to be on the Internet."

The turning point for many Catholic churches and organizations in the New York area came in 1995, when they started planning for the arrival of Pope John Paul II and were looking for new ways to cultivate excitement among Catholics. "Many of them used that as an occasion to put up Web sites and talk about the Pope's visit," Zwilling says.

Although the New York Archdiocese didn't get a site up in time for that visit, Zwilling says it learned a lot by watching the difficulties many others encountered keeping content relevant.

"After the Pope left, most of their sites just sort of stopped," Zwilling says. "For six months after the Pope's visit, you could go to some dioceses' sites and they were still talking about how excited they were that the Pope was going to come."

As a result, the New York Archdiocese decided to avoid doing anything too topical on its early sites, since it had limited resources for updating them.

"But we wanted to have enough flexibility to make some things new," Zwilling says, noting that the late Cardinal John J. O'Connor penned a weekly column in Catholic New York and had a typed transcript of his weekly homily from St. Patrick's Cathedral. "In the beginning, we were able to use those as two examples of fresh, updateable material each week."

The archdiocese unveiled its first Web site in 1997, designing it internally as a purely informational resource. "That site lasted for a number of months, but it was embarrassingly bad," Zwilling says.

After several months, the archdiocese made the decision to hire an outside consultant--Commack, N.Y.-based Invision--to revamp the site.

"It began as a very static project. We came up with a concept to take information about the archdiocese and put it up on the Web," says Eric Manno, COO of Invision, which also built a site for the Diocese of Rockville Center in New York and is involved in an

e-business initiative with St. Patrick's Cathedral. "It continues to evolve now with more interactivity and more communication with their followers. They are trying to build a community in an online environment."

While Invision continues to perform major updates on the site, the company used proprietary content-management solutions so an internal archdiocese team can perform weekly content updates.

"That was perfect for a religious organization because there is always information that [the churches of the archdiocese] want to put up on a regular basis, and it would be too costly for them to have it published manually," Manno says. "We gave them these tools so they can publish on their own."

Zwilling says the plan is to continue adding features to the site to create a more interactive resource for the archdiocese's followers. Some of the planned features include an e-mail feedback option, a way to let people make donations over the Web, and the use of streaming audio and video to Webcast services from New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.