Tokyo (AsiaNews/CWJ) – Japanese bishops and women religious must face the challenge represented by new information technologies and use the internet as a tool to evangelise, spread the Gospel and keep in touch with the faithful.
Mgr Kenjiro Koriyama, the 64-year-old bishop of Kagoshima, is among the internet’s pioneers. He has been on line since the nineties and from a pastoral point of view the results have been satisfactory. His blog or online diary, 24-hourBishop@Ken's Page, is updated almost every day.
“I heard that between 50 and 60 thousand young people were surfing the internet at night, so the Web is a kind of spider web. I began to upload my Sunday homilies and thought it would be good if some young people were caught in that web,” he said.
He began to use voice-over files early on so that people could hear the homilies he addressed in various parishes in his dioceses; this way people could hear what he wrote.
In his Bishop's Diary, Mgr Isao Kikuchi, 48, is less adroit with technology: he can’t upload photos. This is why “I don’t have any cover photo. But I do try to answer all messages that arrive and day in, day out, they help me understand people’s varied nature.”
For the Daughters of St Paul, internet “is useful to make more people known about Christianity and keep in touch with those we know but who are faraway.”
Sister Tanako Ono, 49, who manages the Daughters of Saint Paul’s Sister's Mutterings’ blog, said that “the blog is a new form of communication that cannot be ignored. We must keep up with society.”
The same is true for Sister Shimokama, who works for the Diocese of Nagasaki. She manages the Todo no inori (prayer of the sea lion) blog in which she focuses on her activities and those of the diocese. Thanks to the internet she has been able to know new people and introduce them to Christianity.
“Nagasaki attracts people as a place of faith for Catholics but also many ordinary Japanese,” she said. “A few days ago, I met some readers in Tokyo and I was very happy to find out that five of them were baptised after they discovered the faith through my writings,” she added.