December 12, 2009
Interactive Web site will promote networking for Catholics Come Home
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Carson Weber is a good listener.
Associate director for new media evangelization for the Diocese of Sacramento, Weber is in charge of the advertising campaign, Catholics Come Home, which launches on Dec. 18.
Thousands of ads about the Catholic Church, airing on Sacramento area and Chico-Redding area TV stations through Jan. 31, will direct viewers to an Internet Web site, www.CatholicsComeHome.org, for further information about the Catholic faith.
But welcoming people to the church is only partially about giving information, Weber said. Welcoming also requires listening and responding.
“Nothing can replace the person-to-person encounter of sharing faith,” Weber told The Herald. The ads and the Web site are merely tools for bringing people together, he explained.
Looking for a way to bridge the gap for inquirers between researching Catholicism on the Internet and actually talking with another person about being Catholic, Weber gathered together a team of local parishioners to answer questions from returning Catholics and created an interactive Web site,
www.WelcomeHomeNorCal.com, which will go live Dec. 18.
The Web site features a diocesan parish finder and a question and answer section that Weber will oversee, routing all questions to members of a local parish who will respond personally, he said.
The local Web site is a way of networking, Weber said, a way of putting people together to help one another.
To illustrate his point, Weber recounted a recent telephone inquiry from a woman who had been away from the Catholic Church for decades. She had been a parishioner at St. Mary Parish in Sacramento. After talking with her awhile, Weber learned that she remembered a particular priest who’d been at her former parish many years ago.
From her description, Weber recognized Oblate of St. Joseph Father Arnold Ortiz, now pastor of St. Joseph Marello Parish in Granite Bay, and was able to reconnect his caller to her former priest. That’s the kind of networking he’s hoping the local Web site can help provide.
Just as Weber listened to his caller and helped her on her own journey back to the church, parishioners across the diocese will be ready to welcome home the people who turn to them, he explained, adding that it is Catholics in the pews who will make the Catholics Come Home campaign effective. People are intrigued by the ads, he said, but the ads only prompt them to turn to a living person.
When the Diocese of Phoenix launched a Catholics Come Home campaign during Lent of 2008, parishes in that diocese were deluged with more than 92,000 formerly inactive Catholics and converts over the following year, according to a Catholic News Service article. Weber anticipates a similarly strong response in the Sacramento Diocese in Advent and continuing throughout 2010.
To support the more than 100 parishes in the diocese as the Catholics Come Home campaign gets underway, Weber has conducted workshops to train parish welcome teams, written parish bulletin announcements for parish staff to use as needed, and offered “We Miss You” brochures to help parishioners reach out to neighbors and friends who may be ready for an invitation back to the church.
The Web site, www.WelcomeHomeNorCal.com, will be advertised on Facebook pages and available to Internet search engines beginning Dec. 18.
