More and more parishes setting up their own websites

Recognizing people's increasing interest in and reliance on the internet, more than 40 of the 180 parishes in the Albany Diocese now have their own websites.

There, Catholics can find out the times of Masses, take virtual tours of churches, and learn parish histories. They can even get recipes for homemade cepelinai and sweetcakes.

The recipes are one of the aspects of the website for St. Casimir's parish in Amsterdam, where parishioner Keith Barkevich is the webmaster of www.stcasimirs.com.

Ministry

When he undertook the site design, Mr. Barkevich told The Evangelist, he put "hundreds of hours" into it. "It was, more or less, a ministry for me."

The parish has a large number of Lithuanian Catholics, and the site has received emails from Lithuanians in Chicago, Poland and their home country. The site carries Lithuanian recipes as well as links to the Lithuanian language.

"Relatives of people who have settled in our parish have sent us emails, as well as people that grew up as parishioners and have moved away," he said.

Committee effort

While St. Casimir's website was the work of one man, St. Michael's parish in Troy took another direction, according to parishioner Frank Bonesteel: A committee was formed several months ago to investigate the possibility of launching a website.

"We met a few times and decided what we wanted," he said. "We then contacted Liturgical Publications and discussed our needs. We became one of the first parishes in association with them to launch a website on a software template."

Thus, St. Michael's became a "tester" group for the publisher, which has developed a software for such a venture. St. Michael's site can be viewed at www.stmichael-troy.org.

"All we had to do was basically fill in the blanks on the template software. We were able to choose our own style, colors and graphics," Mr. Bonesteel said. "We've received positive feedback."

Communication

Antonio Parente is the webmaster for St. John the Baptist parish in Greenville. He designed the parish's website to "improve communications for parishioners, some of whom are widely dispersed throughout a large geographic area of northern Greene County that includes the Catskill Mountains.

The decision to launch a parish website came after he completed an associate's degree in computer information services through SUNY-Cobleskill. Mr. Parente and his wife Connie, director of faith formation for the parish, wanted to create an information network for their parish and decided that a website was the perfect solution.

He browsed the internet until he found CatholicWeb.com. According to its website, its mission is to provide "all Catholic churches, dioceses, schools, missions and other types of Catholic organizations with free web service to compliment existing communication efforts and evangelization of the Catholic faith."

Mr. Parente, who said he learned that "content is everything" on a website, found "lots of low-key Catholic information, ads and Catholic content" on the CatholicWeb site. The best part of the entire venture, he added, is that the site is free.

"We could just plug our information in, and they maintain the rest from their end," he said. St. John's site can be viewed at www.stjohnthebaptistgreenville.catholicweb.com.

Active site

Rev. Brian Raiche, pastor of St. Henry's parish in Averill Park, said that its website, www.sthenry.net, has been in operation for more than four years. The parish has 1,700 registered families, and about half of them are registered on the database for the site.

"Most of our new parishioners register with the parish online," he said, "and all of our committee minutes and agendas are sent to members through our site."

Originally developed as a tool to reach out to youth and young adults, he said that over the years, the site has become utilized by all parishioners -- and visitors.

"The site saves on a lot of paperwork and mailing expenses," he said.

(Parishes that want information on designing a website should contact Geralyn Fox, director of the Information Technology Office at the Diocesan Pastoral Center, 453-6685. To link to parishes, visit the Albany diocesan website, www.rcda.org, or The Evangelist's, www.evangelist.org.)

(8/7/03) [[In-content Ad]]