Baltimore, Md., Jun 13, 2019 \/ 04:40 pm (CNA).- Over the course of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops\u2019 spring general assembly, questions arose online: what was going on with the suddenly-chatty USCCB Twitter account? Did they give an intern, or perhaps a particularly hip young priest or enthusiastic new convert the password? Had the account been hacked?<\/p>
As it turns out, none of those were true. The account is run by Connie Poulos, a 31-year-old content and marketing coordinator at the USCCB. She\u2019s not an intern \u2013 and has worked for the conference since 2017, originally as a digital media specialist \u2013 and she\u2019s not a convert, and she\u2019s definitely not a priest. She\u2019s married, and she and her husband are in the process of adopting a son from China.<\/p>
Poulos sat down with CNA during this week\u2019s general assembly to discuss what prompted the USCCB\u2019s new online persona. Apparently, this strategy was part of a larger plan to attempt to present a more humanizing look at the bishops of the conference, and better to engage with the account\u2019s 156,000 Twitter followers.<\/p>
\u201cWhen I first started in 2017, we didn\u2019t engage on this level, but we did engage,\u201d she explained. \u201cThen, McCarrick happened.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The article showcases some of the tweets and the amount of engagement when the account asked \u201cIf you are a young Catholic who is still Catholic, what has made you stay?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many of the replies encapsulate a way forward. They were certainly not a cry for watering down the faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still I was annoyed by one thing. The @USCCB account replied to many of the tweets answering this question. Yet if someone mentioned, the TLM – no reply. I saw a lot of such tweets and mostly they were not from people just trolling the USCCB, but young people impacted by the Latin Mass. They should not have been ignored as if they were lepers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Update: On my Facebook page, Connie Ann Poulos replied to this specific paragraph:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know, it\u2019s interesting. It was pure<\/g> human error on my part and now it\u2019s become a thing. I tried to click \u201clike\u201d on each one, but that doesn\u2019t show up. I think if I were to go in and seek them out now it might be obvious. I know there were some that I was like \u201cawesome!\u201d or \u201camen\u201d or \u201cthanks for sharing\u201d but we literally had a complete tidal wave of TLM responses so it was hard to keep up.<\/p>
I do see how they would have felt ignored, though, and I am sorry about that. Maybe I can find a way to do something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Now just waiting for them to ask us older Catholics, \u201cwhat has made you stay?\u201d Although I sure the answers would have some of the same range as answered here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day on Twitter I was hearing positive things about tweets from the USCCB Twitter account @USCCB. Had I fallen into an alternate universe where the bureaucratic USCCB were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16451,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16447\/revisions\/16451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}