(www.internetpadre.com)

This self-titled “Roman Catholic Resource for the World-Wide Web” offers a directory of links to a wide variety of valuable Catholic resources on the web. Fr. Ronald M. Vierling, the webmaster, is also a teacher in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and uses the site as tool for communicating the Faith to his students and to others.

Two valuable assets for a website, especially for one used as a medium to get to another site, are navigational ease and visual appeal. This site has both and is laid out so tactfully that finding what you need is rather easy and quick. There is, on the other hand, a massive amount of information here, with numerous links as well, so choosing just the item you need from among so many is really the greatest challenge.

Internet Padre and New Advent (http://www.newadvent.org) are interlinked, so The Catholic Encyclopedia on New Advent is indexed on this site. This feature proves to be invaluable at times in searches on the Web. I found myself rather surprised at how much is really available just through the Encyclopedia function itself.

Some other primary features of the site are its theology library and student resource section. The “Theology Library” contains theology articles ar-ranged according to the structure of the curriculum for parochial secondary schools of the Archdiocese of Philadel-phia, and it’s quite an extensive library at that. The “Student Resources Center” is a great place for students, and even non-students, doing research or searching for information to go.

A long list of links is provided to an array of various sites that are useful as well as interesting. You can find dictionaries, online libraries, encyclopedias, and a host of other resources.

In the “Interesting Web Sites” section over three hundred sites are listed, and they’re not all sites with religious content. Go to one link, for example, and you can check your stocks online; another link takes you to traffic reports. Internet Padre has thus provided a Catholic environment from which you can navigate to other places on the Web.

In addition to everything else featured on the site, there’s also a page where you can submit your prayer requests. If you choose, your request will also be made available to other visitors. Whether you choose to keep the prayer request private or made public, it will be remembered in the daily offering of the Eucharist.

Next time you’re searching the Web for Catholic sites, or maybe just surfing, stop by and have a look at what this site has to offer. I did, and ever since then I’ve used it over and over again.

Catholic Educator’s Resource Center
(http://www.catholiceducation.org)

The need for a solid Catholic education of our youth is readily apparent, yet many Catholic schools fail to offer just that. This website provides educational resources to help teachers better convey the important role Christian culture has played in history, the arts, philosophy, literature, politics, and science. It also aims to present effectively the social and moral teachings of the Catholic Church.

Catholic Educators Resource Center is a great site not just for teachers, but for parents of youth as well. It caters especially to those involved in teaching, training, and raising young people, offering materials with a religious perspective on other fields of study.

One section includes helpful articles on specific current social issues such as abortion, euthanasia, feminism, the media, and population control. This section is aimed less at the student and more at the teacher or parent.

The articles provided on the site have been selected from numerous textbooks, academic journals, and popular periodicals to provide teachers and others with a useful variety of resources for representing the Catholic contribution and perspective on a range of topics and current issues. These articles may be downloaded and copied for use in the classroom as supplementary reading materials for the students, or used simply as background by the teacher wishing to be better informed.