Fr Roderick Vonhögen: One of the first questions that came in was; ‘do you need to be dead to be beatified?’

Fr Roderick Vonhogen: ‘I was driven as a teenager to share my faith’, but he explains that he was ‘surrounded’ by other young people who wouldn’t listen. ‘I try to find common points of interests, before I share my faith. I used to get a lot of criticism from fellow priests, saying to me that I should be preaching in the church… I tried to explain that if I blog that I can reach 40,000 people… But when I preach in Church, some people go to sleep and make snoring sounds. If we just continue to do what we do, behind closed doors, we will have empty buildings. Blogging lets me be a shepherd to people who really need one. Jesus asks us to be ‘fishers of men’ and fish people. You need a couple of things – when fishing you need good bait. You need worms! Often in the Church, we talk in a subculture language, and others on the outside don’t understand. So, I talk about Tolkien and we explore his Catholic background. A lot of people are looking for friendship when they blog… We blog because we want to build a parish on the internet – a worldwide parish.
In Holland there was a lot of criticism about the Beatification of JP II – because he was a Pope and Catholic. When I was in St Peter’s Square, I came up with this idea to ask people questions…so I was continually posting You-Tube video answers to that question.
One of the first questions that came in was; ‘do you need to be dead to be beatified?’
And another; ‘was that Pope German or Polish?’

Fr Roderick blogs here and we've just been asked by Richard Rouse to ask our readers to go there to see this conference; because liveblogging is slowing down the internet server.