Sharing in the life of Jesus Christ

Archbishop Comensoli: Hello friends. Good to be with you again. You can see I'm still dressed up having just celebrated the Eucharist here on Sunday. And I thought I'd stay in my vestments today, simply because it's the last of the ordinary Sundays of this liturgical year. So, the last time we'll be wearing green for some time.

Next Sunday is the end of a liturgical year, the beautiful feast of Christ the universal King. And I thought we'd film inside also because you can see over my shoulder here, the great window of our Cathedral of St Patrick's, and at the center of that window is Christ crucified and glorified, who comes in like the sun coming from the east—Son, S-O-N, coming from the east, with the gift of salvation for us. He is truly the Universal King.

And, differently from a very long time now, I'm actually going to invite someone else to be in part of this little recording today. And there's a reason for that too. So if I can introduce to you to Tiffany Davis, who is the manager of communications for the Archdiocese of Melbourne. And Tiffany, for over nearly a year now has been working with her team, and with the mission team, Proclaim, to redevelop our Archdiocesan website. I thought I'd share with you a little bit of what the intention of the website is, and to encourage you to go and have a look at it.

But firstly Tiffany, you know that my instruction to you was to... 'don't make it some sort of bland, informational sort of website; static and doesn't go anywhere; after you look at it who cares after that...' I really wanted it to be alive as a tool of evangelisation. So, tell me how you've tried to capture that in the website.

Tiffany: Sure. It was a wonderful project to work on and I should say it's not finished. It's an ongoing project, and really at the start of the project, we wanted to capture something of the life of the Archdiocese, through its people, through its mission. And so that's something that from the start we wanted it to be a collaborative project so working with the Proclaim team, with IT, with our web developer and with the wider community, to capture something of the life of the Archdiocese. That's what we've tried to do. And as I say it's an ongoing project so the way that the website has been built and the way that it works is not so much just, ‘Here you go. Here's a static page.’ No, it's an ongoing conversation. That's the mission that you've given us, and that we’ve tried to enact.

Archbishop Comensoli: Indeed, Tiff, there was any number of separate websites that have now been brought in under this one website. And it looks different from a lot of other particularly older websites, which had these banners which were just bits of information; and the banners now themselves describe something different about this conversation. So what we're trying to bring about by doing that?

Tiffany: Well I guess one of the things that we wanted to do with this website was not to assume any knowledge. So whether you have been a lifelong Catholic or you're new to the faith, or you're just interested... We wanted to be able to capture anyone on that spectrum. So the way that it's presented, the way the information is presented is really something about the invitation of Jesus to each of us; it's about that personal relationship and then how you might live that through our community—in the community of faith here in Melbourne. So it's not just images and static information. Again, it’s that conversation of faith that we would like people to be part of.

Archbishop Comensoli: And indeed, it's a way of welcoming and allowing people to engage, rather than being passive but being active, and that's terrific.

Because evangelisation, folks, can happen in all sorts of different ways. We have our ways that we've perhaps been used to in the past but there are new ways as well that we can engage in bringing people to share in the life of Jesus Christ and to share in the life of God's community in the Catholic Church. So I commend the website to you. Go and have a look at it. It’s www.melbournecatholic.org. We’ve also got our Instagram accounts and Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts. All of them are linked in with this new endeavour as well.

So until next week, may the Lord be with you and your family and fill you with his tenderness.