TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Franz Klein
Catholic News Service

LA CROSSE, Wis

Streaming video is all the rage on the Internet, and some people are starting to realize how valuable a tool this technology can be in reaching out to young Catholics.

If St. Augustine were alive today, he "would have done his 'Confessions' in video and streamed it on the Internet," Travis Boudreaux, the tech-savvy Louisiana Catholic who founded Catholic-Tube.com several months ago, told The Catholic Times, newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse.

On his Catholic-Tube blog, Boudreaux posts daily some of what he considers the best Catholic videos and podcasts uploaded to major sites such as YouTube.com and GodTube.com, as well as smaller Catholic operations such as LoveToBeCatholic.com and SQPN.com.

A veteran Web watcher, Boudreaux believes that video is the future of the Internet.

"There will always be room for audio and the written word, but video provides a dynamic that's not there otherwise," he said. "Imagine if you could see St. Augustine's emotion. There's so much that's lost without voice inflection and hand gestures."

YouTube.com was created in 2005 and was bought by Google Inc. in October 2006. According to Alexa.com's statistical analysis, YouTube is currently the third most frequented Web site on the Internet.

On YouTube, users can upload, view and share music videos and television clips, as well as video content of their own creation. More than 65 million videos have been uploaded to date. While no pornographic or nude videos are permitted, YouTube relies on its community of viewers to identify and flag such uploads, meaning there is a definite time lag before they come down.

A quick search of YouTube's contents for "Christian" will return a staggering 329,000-plus videos, while a search for "Catholic" will yield 21,000-plus results.

Several bishops use the site, including Philadelphia's Cardinal Justin Rigali, who posted a series of reflections, and Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins, whose monthly "Lectio Divina" meditations have been watched by thousands of viewers.

But nearly half of the videos on the first page of search results for "Christianity" portray the faith in a negative light. And while a search for "Catholic" will yield an inspirational video by "KaterinaMarie" called "Why I am Catholic," and a clip of a Mass with Bishop Fulton Sheen in 1941 among its initial results, there's also a video parodying the church sex abuse scandals, as well as many others that are anti-Catholic or contain salacious material.

"That's why we believe biblical topics need to be discussed in a forum that is respectful of the Word," GodTube.com co-founder and chief executive officer Chris Wyatt said in a Catholic Times interview.

With its first version launched last January, GodTube's quick growth has been phenomenal. The site, which recently added an alternative to the secular networking site Facebook.com, already contains more than 48,000 videos. Wyatt said the site logged more than 10 million visitors by the end of 2007.

But accusations of anti-Catholicism have plagued GodTube, as some users have posted videos that try to discredit the church's teaching on the priesthood, the sacraments, the papacy and other things.

Wyatt, a Baptist, said anti-Catholicism would not be tolerated. "We don't stand for that," he said, although he admitted there were some anti-Catholic videos on the site until a recent string of articles brought them to the company's attention.

Even with these videos removed, clips claiming to discredit elements of Catholic teaching remain on the site, including a John MacArthur lecture series on "The Pope and the Papacy."

Thomas Hall, founder of LoveToBeCatholic.com, believes he has come up with a better alternative.

"About a month ago, I typed 'Catholic' in on YouTube, and six of the first 10 responses were anti-Catholic propaganda," Hall told The Catholic Times. "I felt Catholics needed an equal voice and a safe environment to learn about their faith and to evangelize."

With a background including Web work with Fortune 500 companies, Hall, who just moved from Chicago with his family to Minneapolis, naturally turned to the Internet.

At the end of October, he launched LoveToBeCatholic.com as a test. Like YouTube and GodTube, LoveToBeCatholic is a Web platform for people to post videos. But unlike them, LoveToBeCatholic is specifically Catholic, and Hall works to ensure that nothing anti-Catholic gets posted.

Hall said the online Catholic community has embraced his site. "In the first month I went from zero to 3,000 visitors per day," he said. "I immediately ran into bandwidth problems. I've had to upgrade the servers twice, and I'll have to do that again this year. But that's a really nice problem to have."

Videos range from priests' sermons to humorous skits and church events. Some of Hall's favorites are vocations videos that show young religious in habits engaged in sports or other activities with youths. "You can't capture that in text or audio," he said.

Labels: Catholic, Catholic-Tube, Franz Klein, Godtube.com, YouTube