By Jay Sorgi
OSV News
How does the Catholic Church more effectively reach people through that digital space we live much of our life in, use it to build better human encounters and move them to Jesus Christ’s love, mercy and the sacramental life at the most interpersonal and local of levels?
Evangelization Lab, founded by Dallas-based Jose Manuel de Urquidi, aims to find answers and empower parishes, dioceses and other Catholic organizations with the tools they discover.
“There’s research, there’s something very practical that we’re doing, experiments by ourselves, formation of additional missionaries, things with dioceses,” Urquidi told OSV News.
“We’re very much doing whatever experiments we can run to try to get that message that Christ loves you; you can get off this internet space and into a space where you are in a sacramental loving relationship with Christ and his Church,” Evangelization Lab digital missionary Katie Ruvalcaba said.
Their lab responds to the call that popes have made, from St. John Paul II who said to turn the internet into the “new forum for proclaiming the Gospel,” to Pope Leo XIV’s call to properly and humanely use technology as an evangelization tool in the recent encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas.”
One of Evangelization Lab’s initiatives involves reaching out to dioceses to train their staff and parishes on how to turn digital presence into a much more active source of interpersonal communication.
“We need to get parishes away from the idea that they just need to maintain things, that their online presence is meant to be a digital bulletin, and rather view it as a mission field,” Ruvalcaba told OSV News. “There are people out there looking for you, and when they get to your front door, physical or digital, are they welcomed and are they received?”
People like Taylor Black, interim president of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, are accomplishing what he calls the “hardcore nerd” stuff with Evangelization Lab.
One focus involves how to implement things like artificial intelligence in a way that follows the magisterium and the teachings of “Magnifica Humanitas.”