Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone app

The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession.
The Confession program has gone on sale through iTunes for £1.19 ($1.99).

Described as "the perfect aid for every penitent", it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.

Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.

The app takes users through the sacrament - in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings - and allows them to keep track of their sins.

It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status - but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.

Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.

"Our desire is to invite Catholics to engage in their faith through digital technology," Patrick Leinen of developer Little iApps told Reuters.

The launch comes shortly after Pope Benedict XVI gave urging to Christians to embrace digital communication and make their presence felt online.

In his World Communications Address on 24 January, he said it was not a sin to use social networking sites - and particularly encouraged young Catholics to share important information with each other online.

"I invite young people above all to make good use of their presence in the digital world," he said.

He warned them to keep in mind that digital communication was part of a bigger picture, however.

"It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."

Confession's developers, who are based in Indiana, said they took the Pope's words to heart when they were preparing the application for public consumption.

"Our goal with this project is to offer a digital application that is truly 'new media at the service of the word'," said the company.

The firm said the app was developed with assistance from several priests and had been given the church's imprimatur by Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne in Indiana.

A spokesperson from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales told BBC News the app was a "useful tool to help people prepare for the Sacrament of Reconciliation".

"The Church believes in embracing new technology and this creative app will hopefully help people to make a good confession."

It is thought to be the first time the church has approved a mobile phone application, although it is not entirely unfamiliar with the digital world.

In 2007, the Vatican launched its own YouTube channel.

Two years later created a Facebook application that lets users send virtual postcards featuring the pontiff.

From BBC

God Bless This Gadget

IF YOU HAD TO CHOOSE ONE WEAPON for fighting the next religious war, you could do worse than to pick an iPhone. . In recent months, the foot soldiers of religion have come out with a bevy of new programs designed to win con­verts and make religious practices more accessible. For those of the Jew­ish faith, iBlessing helps in figuring out which blessings go with which food, ParveOMeter keeps track of the t- waiting times between eating meat, and dairy, and Siddur gives prayer times based on one's GPS coordinates. Devout Roman Catholics will appreci­ate iBreviary, which pulls up and dis­plays complete missal and principal prayers in Spanish, French, English, Latin, and Italian.

Ever since Galileo, the relationship between technology and organized religion has been uneasy. The printing press helped spread the Gospel and win new adherents to Christianity, but it also greatly undermined the Catholic Church’s information monopoly. To avoid repeating this mistake, religious organizations are embracing cutting­-edge communications technologies, hoping to stay on

the right side of the next technology revolution.

Less than a year ago, the Vatican deplored "the age of the Internet and the mobile," in which, according to Cardinal Lombardi, the pope's spokes­man, it's "more difficult than before to protect silence and to nourish the interior dimension of life." Since then, the pope has changed his tune. "Young people have grasped the enormous capacity of the new media to foster connectedness, communication, and understanding between individuals and communities, and they are turn­ing to them as means of... forming networks, of seeking information and news, and of sharing their ideas and, opinions," he said in May.

Thank the Vatican's younger cohort for this turnaround. Paolo Padrini, a 36-year-old Italian pastor and a Vatican insider with a knack for technology, is the developer of iBreviary, the first iPhone application officially approved by the Vatican. Padrini launched the ambitious Pope2You site, which aggre­gates the Vatican's presence on various social networks. It boasts cutting-edge social-media components, including an iPhone application that keeps its users updated with the pope's recent speeches and activities and a You Tube channel that features papal video addresses. A site called Wikicath deliv­ers the pope's messages "in a new way, interactive and hypertext, through a platform built in the Wiki style."

Not to be outdone, followers of Islam have begun battling over religion online almost as vehemently as they used to clash in the streets of Baghdad. Even mobile-phone ringtones are emerging as important affirmations of religious identity. So many people have been downloading verses from the Qur'an that a Muslim organization in India saw fit to issue a fatwa declaring it a sin to interrupt the tone before it has fin­ished the verse.

As the Vatican has discovered with its Wikicath site, posting boring texts online doesn't guarantee thousands of followers. Lately the site seems to elicit little comment. If Vatican offi­cials continue to haunt Facebook and Twitter, though, they're bound eventu­ally to absorb the new-media culture. Whether the young crowd will have moved on by then is another story.

By Evgeny Morozov from Newsweek July 27, 2009, p.11

1) What is the tone of the writer towards the use of technology in religion?

2) What is your own opinion about the issue? What do you think are its pros and cons? Relate your answer to your own experiences.