"One Smart Cookie"

While putting up drywall with a group of girls, (yeah, it was interesting, especially when the only nail you can hit is your fingernail) the Pope was mentioned as being the first pope who took advantage of what the media had to offer. I thought this was worthy of a little investigation. I thought it was interesting he would be given such a title, given that John Paul II became the pope more than two decades ago, way back in 1978 and he has had the advantages of the transformations of technology, unlike those prior to him. Wilton Wynn, the former Rome bureau chief at Time magazine, said, “Other popes, of course, in the past have used different kinds of communications, but this man is the first who fully understands that the church has a great opportunity here to reach the entire world by using the mass media." Instead of rallying against the using of media like one might expect for a religious public figure, he saw he could reach millions of people with his messages. Over the years the Pope has done such things as hold conversations via satellite with thousands of Catholic youth in 1987, publish best-selling books, got the Vatican online with a Web address, and (this is my favorite) came out with a music video, featuring him singing and reciting psalms and the Gospels, and he also recorded the rosary. On his first travel abroad in 1979, he astonished the Vatican press corps by answering reporter’s questions. In the early years, it might have been considered viral marketing with people not expecting the church to become modern, but the new delivery systems caught on. He has left the doors wide open to his replacement in advancing the work he has started.