"Vatican's Cyber-Snag: What To Do With All the E-Mail"

In doing research on my parish's history, I have been looking through the archives of Horizons, the official newspaper/magazine of the Eparchy of Parma.  Alongside important documentation of history, there are many articles that serve as wonderful time capsules of culture.  One article reviewing the recent film The Lion King wondered if the movie was too authoritarian, too fascist, too royalist: after all, isn't the message of the film that a good, strong, rightful king can bring a decaying land back to life?  

I have a mix of nostalgia and historical interest in earlier computing, from the days of mainframes like PLATO, through the early PCs like the Altair and through the BBS days, to the burgeoning Internet, and even to the days of Flash and demotivational posters.  Some of the Horizons articles play right in to that interest.  The following is an article by John Thavis from the February 11, 1996 issue of Horizons, discussing the opening of the Vatican.va website:

 



EDIT: A fun side note: the subsequent issue (2/25/1996, p. 11) mentions another organization adding Internet services to its apostolate: EWTN.

EDIT: A quote from Cardinal Roger Mahoney: "Cyberspace has the capacity to be the modern shore of the Sea of Galilee along which the Lord walks calling disciples to himself" (qtd. in "Cardinal sees computer technology as evangelization tool," Horizons, 5/5/1996, p. 10).
 

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