Church ministers can now train in digital communications

The world is immersed in a digital culture and church ministers must know how to effectively communicate in that culture for the benefit of the faithful. For that reason, Loyola University of Chicago has created a master’s program in pastoral studies with a concentration in digital communication.

The program launched Feb. 10 with a panel discussion featuring Catholic communicators Father Manuel Dorantes, Kerry Weber of America Magazine and blogger Rocco Palmo. Archbishop Cupich delivered the opening remarks.

Brian Schmisek, director of the Institute for Pastoral Studies at Loyola, said the institute saw a need to train its students in digital communication.

“Parishes said they needed it. Students said they needed it. Pastoral employees. Priests. Deacons. Laypeople. Dioceses,” he said.

“A century ago we were launching diocesan newspapers,” Schmisek said. “Now we’re in a digital age and we want to prepare people who are going to go into that realm and give them the best skills, education and knowledge that they can have.”

The digital world is just another environment in which we live our lives, he said.

“The church needs and wants to have a presence in the digital world. And we want to provide the education for those who want to do this as a profession.”

The program combines courses from the institute and the School of Communications and will be offered in the fall.

Don Heider, dean of Loyola’s School of Communication, said the idea of the program is to help the church be relevant in today’s digital culture and to especially reach out to young people who are immersed in the technology.

The School of Communication has already worked with the archdiocese’s St. Joseph College Seminary to develop a digital concentration in their work. This new program is a natural extension to that one.

“We have been through a revolution that to me is only comparable to Gutenberg,” Heider said. “The telephone hasn’t been this much of a revolution. Telegraph. Radio. TV. They’ve all had impacts but nothing like the digital revolution we have. It’s affected everything we do.”

To be pertinent you have to understand the digital communication, know how to monitor it and communicate in it, he said.

“I would never say to a church, ‘Give up your other methods of communication.’ But you can supplement it with email, with tweets, with Facebook, and it just gives you another tool, sort of an arrow in your quiver, to try to reach out and bring people in,” Heider said.

In his remarks on Feb. 10, Archbishop Cupich asked that ministers keep the broader implications of digital communications in mind while they study.

“These new communications technologies have created a new culture, and the Gospel message cannot be effectively communicated without the church’s immersing herself in and understanding this culture,” Archbishop Cupich said.

He also asked that ministers entering into the communication realm consider issues such as: How does an authoritative teaching office not only communicate but also make its decisions stick, as it were, in an Internet world that encourages discussion and debate of everything? Do these new media help or hinder the creation of genuine community? And how the church has the responsibility to promote the ethical use of all media, old and new.

“The aim of your studies will be as it always has been: to bring people in our time to an encounter with Christ,” he said, “making them not only disciples but companions who will accompany each other, not merely as Facebook pals, bloggers or tweeters, but as fellow pilgrims.”

For information about the Institute for Pastoral Studies program, visit www.luc.edu/ips.