Cardinal Seán Brady launches new website for the Irish Bishops’ Conference www.catholicbishops.ie

22 Sep 2008

PRESS RELEASE
22 September 2008

Cardinal Seán Brady launches new website for the Irish Bishops’ Conference www.catholicbishops.ie

Cardinal Seán Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, today [22 September 2008] launched a new website for the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference www.catholicbishops.ie. The launch took place in Maynooth on the first day of the Autumn General Meeting of the Irish Bishops’ Conference.

The Bishops’ Conference consists of a General Assembly and a Standing Committee together with various commissions and agencies. Day to day operations are overseen by a secretariat. The Conference enables the Bishops to exchange views, and share their wisdom and experience in order to promote the common good of the Church in Ireland. The current membership of the Irish Bishops’ Conference comprises the 26 Bishops of the dioceses of Ireland together with the seven auxiliary Bishops.

Cardinal Brady said, “I am delighted to launch this new user-friendly website which contains a mine of information on the Bishops of Ireland, detailed information on dioceses, as well as on the people and organisations who make up the agencies, commissions, councils and other bodies of the Irish Bishops’ Conference.

“Daily Mass Readings will be available on the new site, in English and Irish. www.catholicbishops.ie also contains the first online map of the dioceses of Ireland, and will offer users the option to subscribe to news releases issued by the Bishops’ Conference via an RSS feed. The site also contains a bank of audio and video content from the Conference, and will have regular feature articles focused on the mission and work of the Church in Ireland. We hope to build on the site’s content over time, and develop new features in line with the needs of users.

“Our new site should be of special interest to members of the clergy, religious, laity, teachers, policy makers, journalists and all those who wish to find out more about the activities of the Catholic Church at home and throughout the world.”

Cardinal Brady concluded, “A constant theme of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI is evangelisation through the media. In this, the Year of Vocation for the Catholic Church in Ireland, it is appropriate that a prominent feature on the homepage is dedicated to this important year whose purpose is to raise awareness of the common vocation that we all share through baptism, as expressed through witness, love and service.”

ENDS

Notes for Editors:

The email addresses for the staff of the Catholic Communications Office from today are:

Recommended browsers to use with the new site are Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Opera 9.51, Safari 3.1.2.

About www.catholicbishops.ie:

  • The site gives biographical details of each Bishop and also details of their Episcopal responsibilities.
  • An interactive site map illustrates the boundaries between dioceses and provides a link to information on each diocese.
  • www.catholicbishops.ie provides for audio and visual content including interviews with Bishops and, for example, the 1979 live recordings of the homilies delivered by the late Pope John Paul II during his pilgrimage to Ireland.
  • Links to the commissions, agencies, councils and other bodies of the Bishops’ Conference are provided on the homepage of the website, as well as a link to the Vatican website www.vatican.va
  • Major publications by the Bishops are available in the Irish language and, since 2006, in the Polish language. These publications are available on the new site.
  • The press release archive goes back to 2001 and www.catholicbishops.ie subsumes the service offered by the previous Bishops’ website www.catholiccommunications.ie.
  • www.catholicbishops.ie was designed and developed by Church Support Ltd (GetOnline division)

Further information:

Martin Long, Director of Communications (086 172 7678)
Kathy Tynan, Communications Officer (086 817 5674)