Pope: Let there be blogs

And you thought the blogosphere was journalistic purgatory. Maybe. But look who’s joining the fray:

The pope, whose own presence on the Web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests on Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.

And just using e-mail or surfing the Web is often not enough: Priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.

“The spread of multimedia communications and its rich ‘menu of options’ might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web,” but priests are “challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,” he said.

Part of the pope’s reasoning was that if Jesus was alive today, he’d have a blog. Maybe so. But he should know The God Blog is taken.