Catholica Australia is a new lay-led, cyberspace initiative which seeks to reach out and provide a place of community and contact for a sector of that 85% of baptised Catholics who have become disenchanted with the institutional Church over the last few decades. We also seek to establish points of contact with those who might continue to be tempted to follow the 85% who have already left.

To reach this audience who, self-evidently, have few channels of contact with the Church we will eventually be doing most of our advertising in secular media channels which do intersect with the audience we are interested in reaching.

In this first stage though we are seeking to create a core community of between 50 and 100 volunteers who have skills in communication or in building communities. If you can assist us you are more than probably already working in some professional capacity within the institution. The heart of our Catholica Australia community is a discussion forum. To attract our audience to this meeting place we will be publishing lead commentaries, lifestyle and humorous articles each day that are designed not only to entertain and stimulate the discussion and controversy that attract an audience, they also seek to stimulate the building of a sense of community.

While we are seeking professional communicators to assist us we are not looking for individuals who believe they might have all the answers to life's problems. Rather we are seeking individuals who have seen a bit of life and who might be able to "connect" with those who, self-evidently, haven't been very enchanted recently with what the institutional Church seems to offer. We are also interested in encouraging new writers and younger communicators who can open up channels of communication so that our initiative has wide outreach over the generations.

I invite you to have a look around our website and, if you can help, register to join the endeavour. We seek to keep this as a "free access" initiative and it is being funded from philanthropic support and down the track we hope to carry select advertising that will help sustain the endeavour.

Thank you for taking the time to aquaint yourself with our Catholica Australia intiative.

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher
Catholica Australia

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