Vatican says the church can’t ignore social media

Social media can bring out the worst in people, and even Pope Francis’s enormously popular Twitter feed is peppered with nasty comments. But the Vatican’s chief media strategist says the Catholic Church cannot ignore the opportunities for evangelization that the Internet offers.

“In our church we are always fishing inside the aquarium,” Archbishop Claudio Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told a gathering of journalists May 22. “And we forget that most fish are outside the aquarium.”

Unless the church engages social media, he said, “we will wind up talking to ourselves.”