Over the last ten years, over 13,000 Italian Catholic movements, associations and groups have opened websites on the Internet and, of these, 11,480 are still available on line. The point is made by Francesco Diani, coordinator of www.siticattolici.it, the web address that has recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. It was on 12 June 1997 – recalls Diani in a message sent to Catholic sites – that the List [of Catholic websites] made its debut on the web. The Italian Church was then taking its first steps in cyberspace. It already glimpsed the new and extraordinary possibilities of evangelising through the web”. “From the 243 websites of that time the Church has come a long way”, comments Diani, calling Catholic websites today “a vast archipelago of initiatives of ecclesial or personal character, a concrete response to the new evangelization, not the only one nor the first, but – and this decade of growth confirms it – far from episodic or fragmentary”. “Our realities – says the statement – are increasingly the sign that in the culture of our time we are able to move in a coordinated way in pursuit of a wider project of common missionary endeavour”. Diani expresses the hope that “work on the web” would be “directed at the better service of the Gospel and Christ, and of those who look to him as the light of truth”.
