By Vernon Khelawan

For more than a century (119 years –May 6) the Catholic News has faithfully served the Catholic community of this Archdiocese, attempting in more ways than one, to encourage the communication process among the nation’s Catholics.

Over the years, this grand old lady of the Trinidad and Tobago media landscape has, in its own unique way, served to satisfy the Archdiocese’s need for evangelisation, through carefully selected content and an abundance of specially crafted articles that mark the important days or periods in the Church’s annual calendar.

The written word can prove to be a potent evangelisation tool, something which the Catholic News fully understands and because of this, makes every effort to ensure that its stories and columns, which contribute to the process of evangelisation take pride of place in its every edition.

More recently, coming out of a Synod 2009 resolution, it began to publish a column, primarily geared to exploit all the possible ways and means of using the written word to ramp up the awareness of the necessity for Catholics to push forward with the evangelisation process, as it impacts powerfully on its thousands of readers every week.

While there is full agreement that the written word alone cannot fully serve the needs of evangelisation in the archdiocese, there also has to be full agreement that it can greatly assist those who take it upon themselves to move the evangelisation mission forward in whatever way they do, more so when full or partial use is made of the information within the pages of the newspaper.

Technology in the 21st century has brought many changes to the communication industry and the Catholic News had no choice but to keep up with these changes.

But it has not been overwhelmed by the technology. Rather, it has embraced it and by so doing has expanded its reach not only nationally but internationally, and the feedback from the diaspora indicates that the online edition of Catholic News (www.catholicnews-tt.net) is well read in the various Trinidad and Tobago enclaves in many of the world’s largest cities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Additionally, the paper is also making full use of the social media, in that links on the Archdiocesan Facebook page will send readers to Catholic News website stories.