Vatican seeks “.catholic” Domain Name

June 15, 2012: The Vatican has announced that it wants to create a “.catholic” domain name as a way of validating official Catholic institutions online. “Our idea is that those communities that make up the Church will be able to apply to have this ‘dot catholic’ web address as a way of authenticating their presence in the web space,” said Monsignor Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications told Vatican Radio.

The online suffix would be granted by the Vatican to Catholic bodies across the world so that internet users “can be certain that it’s coming from a genuinely Catholic source,” he said. The Vatican is just one of nearly 2,000 new applications to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICCAN), the US-based organization that decides on new domain names.