Province of Mary, Mother of the Americas

Making Her Message Known Digitally

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Written by By Fr. Ron Gagne, M.S.

As we begin a New Year of Our Lord 2012, it’s good to remember that the “good news” underlying Mary’s words at La Salette to pray and follow her Son each day and we will be blessed beyond measure. Now that’s a New Year’s resolution on which we can all take time to reflect!

Our Past and Present – A Growing Proposition

For the past several years, I have been serving as Director of our La Salette Communications Center in Attleboro, MA. It has been one of the most challenging and enjoyable ministries in my forty years of priesthood as a La Salette Missionary. We began about five years ago. We published a professional La Salette magazine quarterly for over two years, La Salette America, with many supportive comments. Now it’s offered online.

For the last five years we have spent a great deal of time expanding our original fledgling web site into a professional site of which we can be proud. Our online audience has grown from just 50-75 visitors a day in 2008; we increased to 400 visitors a day in 2010; now our visitors in December of 2011 have reached an average of 1,200 visitors a day or over 244,000 total visitors for 2011! We hope to reach more and more people since our office’s purpose is simply “to make Mary’s message known” to all her people, all 7 billion of them – so we still have our work cut out for us, one person at a time.

Listening to Pope Benedict

Pope Benedict XVI greets people in St. Peter’s Square from atop his Popemobile, Vatican City

We take seriously the words of Pope Benedict XVI who, on Jan. 24, 2011, the Catholic Church's World Day for Social Communications, called on Church ministry to use the latest technologies, such as web sites and blogs, to preach the gospel and encourage a dialogue with their visitors.
He asked priests to become more media savvy by preaching to the faithful from the internet as well as the pulpit. The Pope said that “we are living through a period of vast cultural transformation. This means of spreading information and knowledge is giving birth to a new way of learning and thinking, with unprecedented opportunities for establishing relationships and building fellowship.”

Hopefully we are responding to his invitation by hopefully doing several new projects this year, including offering all our presently available La Salette paperback books but in digital format (for use on the ipad, Nook, Kindle and other digital readers and phones). We also hope to offer new digital publications such as a collection of Fr. Normand Theroux’s homilies – over 150 of them – for reflection and meditation. He was a La Salette priest, scripture scholar, teacher and retreat director who wrote much and well.

Our present web site offers information on La Salette life, our worldwide ministries and spirituality as well as other topics of interest, including:

We can proudly say that our Province web site (lasalette.org) has more online information on the La Salette message and mission than anywhere in the world! Just as Mary did at La Salette, we are “always… ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks (us) for a reason for (our) hope” (1 Peter 3:15). Sharing her La Salette message can help someone get on the path of faith once again, be reconciled with her Son, and help them move on in hope.

In addition, following the words of Mary at La Salette to "make my message known to all my people," we are introducing NOT ONLY a new design BUT ALSO the ability to read our web site in any of over 40 languages (using the Google Translate helper, available at the very top of all pages of our web site). Isn't modern technology marvellous!

As we continue our ministry in the La Salette Communications Center, we thank you for using our web site and its many resources. May God continue to guide us to make Mary’s message known… on this earth, in the digital world and beyond.