Spain’s barefoot nuns put faith in YouTube to find new convent recruits, reports the Guardian. It goes like this – For the 11 remaining “Barefoot Carmelite” nuns at the San Jose convent in Ecija, near the southern Spanish city of Seville, the future looked grim. The Mother Superior was persuaded by friends to put up a video on YouTube, showing life inside the convent.
Thousands of YouTube visits later, not only has the phone been ringing almost continuously, but the first new novice has walked through the doors after seeing the video online.
I wonder what the girl who walked in was thinking… I googled for this bit of news to see if there were any reactions out there already. I found it in a discussion forum on a website called Unexplained Mysteries. Ah, well…
I watched the video out of curiosity, and had this stray thought at the sight of a nun, her long back habit covering her entire body and some of the face – how different is this from the Muslim burqa? Or the practice of covering the head with the sari pallu in front of strangers? Is the idea not the same? What makes one of these identified with devotion, the other with terrorism and the third, simply ignorance?
And this from the Hindu today – Coming soon, Pope on YouTube. Unlike the nuns from the convent, this piece quotes a spokesman – Pope explicitly approved of the channel. He said the Pope was “a man of dialogue†who wanted to engage with people wherever they are.
In other news, Italian Mafia finds its way onto Facebook – if that does not teach you to be careful before you punch, poke or just extend a hand for franship on facebook, I don’t know what will.
Think of what Hitler would have done with social networking. Actually, think of what he did without it.