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The Internet can help you do many things, but, if you're Catholic, you can't use the Web to confess your sins. The Catholic Church says that online confessions are not an acceptable substitute for the real thing.

The Internet is an excellent instrument for evangelization and religious dialogue, but it cannot be turned into an online recycle bin for sins in place of traditional face-to-face confessions, a senior Vatican official said Tuesday.

The red light to online confessions is contained in a document being prepared by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, which broadly welcomes the Net as a powerful instrument for evangelization, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.

The sacrament of confession, by which the Roman Catholic faithful receive pardon and absolution for their sins, must always take place in "the sacramental context of a personal encounter," Archbishop John Foley, the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told the Italian Catholic news service SIR on Monday.

"Internet offers the Church the opportunity to make the saving message of Christ accessible throughout the world," Foley said. "In societies that don't allow the presence of priests, nuns, religious or lay missionaries, Internet can offer people undertaking a spiritual quest, or even just the curious, a chance to obtain information or find an inspiration that would otherwise be impossible."

Possible Problems

The Internet, like all communications media, offers more opportunities for good than temptations for evil, Foley was quoted as saying by Corriere della Sera. "It depends on how you use it," he said.

The American-born archbishop cited the spread of pornography and violations of privacy as some of the negative aspects of the Web. Some young people, he said, "spend hours in front of their computer screen in search of endless diversion."

The Vatican document will discuss problems associated with unequal access to the Web and warn against it becoming a resource reserved for the developed world's elite, the Corriere della Sera said.

Foley's statement is simply an update of Church regulations to keep pace with technological progress, said Father Paolo Floretta, a Franciscan friar who runs a Web site allowing the Catholic faithful to send prayers to Saint Anthony of Padua from all around the world.

Prayers Online

"The sacrament of confession requires the physical presence of the priest and the penitent," he said in a telephone interview. "Privacy is absolutely not guaranteed on Internet, and there is no certainty as to the identity of the two parties to the communication. You can't have confession by e-mail, any more than you can have it by telephone or letter."

Father Floretta's site has received thousands of e-mail prayers since it began operating a year ago, he said. The prayers, which could contain appeals for help with health or other practical problems, are saved onto a floppy disk and delivered every day by the friars to the tomb of the saint--Saint Anthony evidently doesn't need a PC to read them--in Padua Cathedral, Floretta said.

The faithful have been seeking the intercession of the saint, whose speciality is the finding of lost objects, for hundreds of years, Floretta said.

"People used to send their requests on parchment, then it was paper, and now it's floppy disks. The medium has changed, but the symbolic significance remains the same."

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