“AND YOU WILL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE”

For seekers of the truth, the truth is here – at www.aleteia.org
 

Just four months after it first launched, Aleteia, an aggregator of worldwide Catholic sites, has moved into the stratosphere, becoming partners with Google and its globally tested and proven Internet technologies. Aleteia - from the Greek word for truth, “aletheia” – has, in fact, aggregated over a thousand sites representing media, Catholic institutions, movements and blogs, and offers video and audio.

In preliminary research called “web listening,” Aleteia employed a data aggregator, that is, an organization involved in compiling information from detailed databases. The end result is a website dedicated to evangelizing through teaching, providing information, offering analyses, and answering questions about faith, family, bioethics, evangelization, science, marriage, education, travels, Islam, inter-religious dialogue, euthanasia, culture and society, stem cell research, human sexuality, history, and a plethora of other topics.

Research done for Aleteia in English, French, Spanish, Italian showed that the top three topics – what the report called macro themes - of discussion to surface in the Web Listening and Spirituality Report were, in fact, faith, family and bioethics.

Jesus Colina, president and editorial director of Aleteia.

At the top of the home page, readers can see what is trending. As I write, on the page in English (there are 6 languages at the moment), immigration, gun reform, Mali, Islam, religious persecution and the March for Life are trending.

Aleteia also issued a press releasing announcing “A Moment with Mary.” The rosary will be recited daily, Monday through Friday, from the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica at 4 p.m. Various individuals and groups – pilgrimages, seminarians, Religious sisters, etc. - will pray the rosary and the video carried globally by Aleteia. Last October, the month of the rosary, Benedict XVI asked the faithful "to give high regard to praying the rosary during the Year of Faith."

People can sign up for this iniative on the Aleteia site. By today, 24,800 people had joined this initiative on Google Plus.

The new web site was presented at a packed press conference today at the Hotel Columbus, just yards from St. Peter’s Square. Presenters included Jesus Colina, co-founder and former director of Zenit News and now president and editorial director of Aleteia, Andrea Salvati, who left a top manager position with Google to help with Aleteia, and Fr. Paolo Pedrini, coordinator of the Pope2You project for the Vatican’s social communications council and now director of Aleteia’s strategy and development office. He will head the ethics committee that will ensure the Catholic values of the advertising partners. Salvati is Aleteia’s managing director and the CEO of AdEthic, a Church-approved advertising platform to help Catholic websites (adethic.net).

Aleteia will be financed through donations and advertising, thus the importance of AdEthic. the new international advertising network launched, as Aleteia, by the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media (www.fem-roma.org). Aleteia expects its advertising services to start operating at full capacity by March after an initial period of testing.

In 2009, Pope Benedict urged members of the Catholic media to proclaim the Gospel on the "Digital Continent." A year later, a coalition of laypeople and Church leaders launched the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media (FEM), as a non-profit organization that seeks to use the latest new media technologies to give greater visibility to the Christian faith in the world of communication.

Write to Joan at:
joansrome@ewtn.com 

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