Catholicsensibility.catholic? Not going to happen. And not because people on the opposite side of Catholic ideology think of me as a heretic. Father Z and Mark Shea and all the other usual suspects won’t get it either. No bloggers, says Msgr. Paul Tighe from the Pontifical Council for Social Communications:

The Vatican does not plan to allow individual bloggers or private Catholics to use “.catholic.” Use of the domain would be limited to those with a formal canonical recognition: dioceses, parishes and other territorial church jurisdictions; religious orders and other canonically recognized communities; and Catholic institutions such as universities, schools and hospitals.

The PCSC laid out about three-quarters of a million dollars to apply for the .catholic domain in four alphabets. Probably a good investment. If approved, the .catholic suffix could be leased out to those communities. I don’t, however, see a LCWR.catholic or an NCRep.catholic by 2013, the earliest when the new domain names would go into effect.

Is this a good investment? I’m not sure. My blog platform recently upped their fee to give me catholicsensibility.com from $17 to $18. I could be wrong about it, but the “personalized” web site seems to be a bit irrelevant. And even if some enterprising person wanted to do their own catholicsensibility, after nine years of blogging, I pretty much own Google for hits on my name and web site.  Especially when it gets topical. I can’t remember the last time I actually typed in a domain name. Links. Search. Ctrl-C and ctrl-V.

Artistically speaking, “.catholic” seems a bit long to me. .rcc and .cat are probably more proportional to what I’m looking for. But again, people hardly type addresses anymore. What do you think? Would you want to be identified as .catholic? I think I’m okay with being out in the world. I don’t get many seekers here, but I’d like to think I’m as open to them as anyone.

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