It Has Been 9 Years!....

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Priestly bloggers are a great gift to the Church

So says the headline over at one of Britain's leading Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Herald.

In conjunction with World Communication Day, The Holy Father has issued a message and document on how the Church is encouraging her members and even her priests to use the technology of today to promote activities in the area of evangelisation. The Pope writes: "... Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelisation and catechesis."

I have been blogging since my days in the seminary way back in 2001 and never stopped. That makes this my 9th year of engaging in the blogosphere. When the blog phenomenon first appeared sometime in August 1999, I wasn't yet aware of its influence and only got round of its presence when I had nothing to do one evening and did some surfing in the office of the St Anne's parish where I was doing my pastoral there then in 2001. It was then that I came across the Blogger website and decided to sign up (free) to become one of its already growing base of bloggers online. The rest, as they say, is history.

When I first started, I found it a useful tool and an outlet for me to express my thoughts concerning the journey I was going through as a seminarian then and to, sort of, catechise the general public what life in the Seminary was all about. Then the entries were mostly in text and links. Today, as you have already gathered, a blog entry can easily accomodate all kinds of visual stimuli and specialised links that can take a person on a portal ride to another universe!

It has been quite a ride since I started blogging and I have never once regretted taking this up. It certainly has been an instrument of evangelisation, with what little I have contributed so far, and a way of reaching out to readers of liked-minded inspiration or to those who just want to find out what goes on in the mind of a priest like myself. It is also humbling to note that my blog is listed in the Catholic Blog Directory under the 'L' section all this while, with a new addition recently of Fr Luke's one under 'R'...

So, if you haven't decided anything yet about blogging, maybe you would like to seriously considering this as your next project? Speaking of which, here's one which I managed to help put up after convincing these friends to put their passion for food into a light-hearted commentary on local culinary delights. How's that for putting in another 'soul to the fabric of the Web'...

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