WORDS Catherine Marshall PHOTO Bene Powell

Catherine Smibert says people are still asking questions about faith. The Church just has to find new ways to provide the answers.

Pilgrims at Sydney’s World Youth Day would have noticed a statuesque young woman sweeping through the city—from press conference to prayer session to revved-up festival gathering—video camera in hand, capturing the joy and spiritual revelry of WYD.

And when Catherine Smibert wasn’t out in the crowds reporting back to Rome, she was co-ordinating a team of Vatican journalists, working as Master of Ceremonies at various events, hosting a workshop at the MAGiS Youth Festival, and—most significantly—celebrating her faith alongside hundreds of thousands of contemporaries.

Such a mammoth gathering of Catholics in Sydney must have felt like sweet comfort for the girl who attended a Jewish school and was kicked out of a Christian youth group because she was Catholic.

Raised in Sydney and New Zealand, Catherine’s life is inseparable from her faith, unfolding in a richly-textured ribbon of belief and intellectual enquiry. The hostility towards Catholicism that she encountered early on forced her to develop ‘real answers’ to key questions in order to justify her faith, and led to a career in journalism that took her all the way to the Holy See.

Journalism, however, was not an obvious career path. After writing in her Year 12 Year Book that her life’s mission was, ‘To change the negative apathy in society and to inject beauty and truth into it in order to ignite social conscience’, Catherine embarked on a psychology degree at university, but says she soon found the studies too superficial.

‘I also wanted to reach more people than just one at a time’, she says.

Teaching catechesis at the local primary school was an influential start, opening her eyes to the dynamics of enculturation.

‘When these 10-year-olds pushed me with questions such as “Will I go to hell if I commit suicide?” or “What does God think of contraception?”, I realised that these were concepts which were unknown to me at the same age and that the children’s access to them had predominately come from TV and the internet’, she reflects.

‘It dawned on me, that no-one in our society was directly taking their cues from the government, teachers, academics, or even parents, but instead had views primarily formed by media.’

Catherine immediately transferred her degree to a Bachelor of Media, Journalism and Communications, ‘and never looked back’.

After collaborating with local government bodies, winning a Young Citizen of the Year award, and working with the Sydney Olympic Broadcasting Organisation, she quickly realised that she wouldn’t be able to get the experience she needed in Australia because, as she says, ‘no-one was really tackling the media from a faith-based angle in dynamic new ways’.

She was then offered a place as a volunteer at the Vatican Youth Centre to work on a series of pilgrimage programs for a month. Two weeks later she arrived in Rome, a city which would be her home for seven years.

Overnight, she found herself immersed in telling the Catholic story. She was offered a job as Executive Producer of Pater TV, a company which produced Catholic music video clips for the secular market. Soon, freelance and permanent opportunities poured in from Vatican news agency Zenit and networks such as the BBC and CNN. Catherine achieved priceless admission into Vatican Radio.

While working at a ferocious pace, she was also studying bioethics and religious communications at Pontifical universities. These were great opportunities to start developing handy skills.

‘How would I have better studied the trends of interactive social media and how it affects and reflects in the Church? How would I have learned Canon Law? When would I have known about the functionality of the World Wide Church body as well?’

More pragmatically, Catherine was part of the grassroots team which broadened the reach of the Vatican media through new technologies such as podcasting and video webcasting.

‘After we presented our findings at an international Catholic Broadcasters Congress in Madrid in 2007, it was exciting to see it bear fruits finally at the Sydney World Youth Day where www.wydcrossmedia.org had over one million downloads in its two week life’, says Catherine, who had returned to Sydney as coordinator of a multi-lingual team of WYD Vatican reporters.

Experience has taught Catherine good press is there for the Church’s taking. ‘Know your stuff— don’t be as ignorant as the next guy. Know which media angle to spin and sell. And work together!’

Religion is back in vogue, she says. ‘Following the death of Pope John Paul II, the famous Regensburg speech and political debates on issues from bioethics and the environment to terrorism and war, the world got back to discussing things of a religious nature and people were interested in hearing the Church’s perspective.’

She says opportunities now abound for Catholic organisations to harness awareness through websites, blogs, videos, interviews, music and other cutting-edge technologies.

Following her own advice, Catherine has established a public relations, communications and marketing company, working for clients such as Catholic Life, Catholic Mission Australia and Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans.

‘It’s a pleasure to see results being driven through the combination of professionalism and faith’, says Catherine. ‘It’s altruistic, creative and sustainable. I love it!’

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