Always at the forefront of embracing new technology, the Vatican has recently announced that it will be formally be joining the Internet via a new YouTube channel for the pope. Pope Benedict welcomed visitors to the new site encouraging them to “feel involved in this great dialogue of truth.”

 The Vatican has stated that the channel is a novel way for the Church and the Pope to interact and engage a new generation of tech-savvy souls. Pope Benedict has praised sites like Facebook and MySpace in the past for their power to bring people of disparate points of view together, while at the same time acknowledging the danger posed by over indulging in social networking to the point of straining real world relationships. During the World Day of Communications Benedict asked online media producers to preserve the “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality,” no doubt a reference to the ubiquity of porn sites online.

 Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, the head of the Vatican’s office of social communications says that the pope gave his blessing to the official Vatican YouTube channel, citing Benedict’s status as “a man of dialogue” who, while not being able to reach out to all people, wished to interact with as many people as possible. “It’s true that not all of humanity is found on YouTube, but millions of people meet on YouTube,” Monsignor Celli said. When accessing the Vatican’s YouTube channel Celli indicated that the intent was to make the user feel like they were “in a personal dialogue with the pope.”

 The Vatican also acknowledges that some part of the YouTube channel is an effort to control the image of Pope Benedict and the Vatican online. “It’s undeniable that certain images are already circulating,” Celli said. The Vatican claims that there are numerous unlicensed images of the pontiff being hosted all over the web, and while there is little the Church can do to with regards to external sites, by hosting their own YouTube content they hope to exert some more force over their depiction online.

 A spokesperson for the Vatican, Rev. Federico Lombardi, hopes that Google will aide them in tracking down unlicensed usage of its images, adding that the Vatican “didn’t pay a cent to Google,” like any other YouTube user. The Vatican sees the Pope’s channel as an “offering” to the Internet community, Lombardi said. For its part, Henrique de Castro, Google’s managing director for media solutions, has said that the company is working on verifying that the Pope’s content will be seen in China, where Internet censorship of religious sites is common. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of diplomacy between the Vatican and China.

 Vatican City has had a presence on the web since Christmas Day in 1995, when it launched http://www.vatican.va. Many other large church and national organizations (the Vatican operates as both in one, having been formally recognized by the world community as a sovereign state in 1929, although it is not the Catholic Holy See, per se) have come online in the last decade, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who launched the royal YouTube channel in December 2007, and of course America’s President, Barack Obama.