Heeding Pope Francis' call to a more action-oriented evangelization through technology, the new We Parent More app will be officially unveiled at the Catholic Press Association's annual gathering, this year in Denver. The app combines masstimes.org functionality with several features that facilitate a young parent's ability to navigate an online parish community, even registering for a sacrament or scheduling an information session with the local parish school.
"We Parent More is at the nexus of technology and the New Evangelization," says the app's creator, Fr. John Belmonte, SJ, who also serves as the superintendent of schools in the Diocese of Joliet. "One of the church's key demographics is millennial parents, who, themselves, have incorporated apps into every facet of their lives from banking to exploring real estate to grabbing tickets for a movie—this app meets users where they live and invites them home to their local parish community."
Functional on Androids, iPhones, and Windows Mobile platforms, the free, web-enabled app offers young parents a variety of readily accessible parenting resources such as information on how to soothe a teething toddler to age-appropriate education activities for the little ones themselves. Fully integrating the masstimes.org data, the app is an invaluable tool for young parents to locate the closest mass if the young ones delay their home departure. Parents who are new to a community can also peruse parish bulletins or connect with young adult groups and enter a parish for the first time with some familiarity and sense of belonging. If their parish hasn't fully integrated their information into the app, users can access a variety of authentic, intuitively organized Catholic resources including the @pontifex twitter feed, USCCB materials and blog posts.
"There are 19 million Catholics between the ages of 19-34 in the U.S.," notes Annie Krug, a parent herself and board member of the non-profit APPostolic. "The vast majority states their primary goal is striving to be good parents—we value it above career or wealth and this app can help us all be better parents by integrating faith resources into a platform we already familiar with and use on a daily basis."
The 2010 Pew Research Study entitled Confident, Connected and Open to Change corroborates the notion that millennial parents are committed to improving their parenting. The study reflects millennial parents' prioritization of parenting even above succeeding at marriage.