Vatican’s Web Site Popular Over 1 Million Visited Site On Internet In First 3 Days

Pope John Paul II’s new Web site debuted on Easter Sunday and quickly became one of the most popular destinations on the Internet.

More than a million people visited the site in the first three days.

ESPN’s SportsZone, which claims to be the most popular place on the World Wide Web, gets an average of 400,000 visitors a day.

The number of people stopping at the Vatican site is expected to drop as the novelty wears off. After all, ESPN updates its site almost hourly with sports news and game scores. The Vatican doesn’t expect developments in Catholicism to occur quite that rapidly. According to a Vatican press release, new documents will be added as they are produced, a couple a month. And older documents will be added as time allows.

The Holy See’s site features six overall headings: the Holy Father, the Curia, Archives, Museums, News Services and Jubilee 2000. Most of the information is available in six languages. Latin, the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church, is not one of them.

The background is designed to look like parchment paper.

“It’s really pretty, very distinctive looking,” said Eric Meisfjord, director of communications for the Spokane Diocese. “It’s not exactly your point-and-click affair, like most Web sites you find.”

While many Web sites strive to be flashy, colorful and interactive, the pope’s homepage has a low-key appearance and most of the content involves serious theological documents.

For instance, a browser can click on an icon of St. Peter and bring up a list of several recent popes, including John Paul II. Under each name is a list of options including a biography, encyclicals and apostolic letters,.

Whether the world’s 950 million Catholics will find much of the information interesting remains to be seen. Dan Ritchie, a chaplain at Sacred Heart Medical Center and a church deacon said he thought pope watchers would find the news services interesting for its daily bulletins.

But people accustomed to catchy text written by advertisers and marketers will be bored.

“It’s a really intense site,” Ritchie said. “It might be too much for some people.”

Still, it may be the first time that the average person can easily access something like the documents of Vatican II.

“It’s like a lot of stuff on the Web,” said the Rev. Jim Dallen, a professor of religious studies at Gonzaga University. “In some respects it’s more of a curiosity than anything else.”

The site features a search engine, making it possible for users to comb the documents for certain references.

“That will be really helpful,” Dallen said.

There is no way to directly e-mail the pope or anyone else at the Vatican. There was a mailbox on the old Web site, which closed a year ago. But an average of 300,000 messages a month, many requesting special prayers, proved overwhelming.

The site was designed by an American, Sister Judith Zoebelein, a member of the Fransiscan Sisters of the Eucharist. It took more than a year to get the new site up and running.

“The church is 2,000 years old, that goes with the territory,” Ritchie said of the long awaited opening of the new site.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WEB SITE The Vatican Web site can be found at: http://www.vatican.va