It was the first ever meeting of its type held in the Vatican. The participants were
150 mostly Catholic bloggers who had come from all over the world to attend a meeting
this week for bloggers organised jointly by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and
for Social Communications. But what was the feedback from this meeting from the
bloggers themselves and how do they see the future of blogging evolving? To find
out more about their hopes and concerns, Susy Hodges spoke in turn to Carol Glatz,
correspondent and blogger for Catholic News Service, and Lisa Hendey, a housewife
from California, who's founder and editor of the blog: Catholicmom.com
Glatz
says one of the concerns raised at the meeting by both the bloggers and Father Lombardi
(the Vatican spokesman) was the sometimes heated nature of the exchanges on blogging
sites: "it's very easy for an (overbig) ego to get in the way... and it's easy to
get caught up in the emotions" ... "but it's not very Christian." She said Father
Lombardi urged the bloggers to be more charitable and remember that their job is "being
at the service of the Church, at the service of others."
Asked about the
rewards of blogging, Hendey says: "It's really the sense of community, of a shared
sense of purpose and the drive to share our faith in this way, to be a family together,
journeying towards Christ." When it comes to how blogging will evolve in the future,
Hendey believes (like Glatz) that the "technology related to Twitter and Facebook
is already impacting on blogging which means "a trend towards micro-blogging" with
much shorter messages than traditional blogs.