AUSTRALIA
The Age
By Barney Zwartz, Religion Editor
December 11, 2005
THE Catholic Church plans to use the media to get its message to a world increasingly reluctant to attend church.
The church's leadership, which has long been suspicious of the media and on the back foot over such scandals as clerical sexual abuse, plans to guide the church into "the media age". The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference will issue a pastoral document in February.
"It's a question of awareness," Perth Archbishop Barry Hickey said yesterday. "We live in the media age. Sometimes we're slow to recognise that, preferring just to communicate within the Catholic family itself when we ought to be listening to the world and responding."