Summer is upon us, and as the weather improves it becomes more palatable to get out and get some exercise, and shed that winter weight. As always, technology is here to help you with motivation, tips, and support.

To get you started, our friends over at SQPN have the Healthy Catholic podcast. Recorded by the indomitable Podfather, Fr Roderick, Healthy Catholic offers tips and support for those looking to improve their physical wellbeing from a great Catholic priest. Check out www.tinyurl.com/healthycatholic to hear more.

Once you’ve been sufficiently motivated to get out the front door, technology is there to help you track your progress. There’s a bunch of great exercise logging websites, and one of the front runners is www.mapmyfitness.com. This is a fantastic network of sites that lets you record your journeys and tracks your performance online – helping you to keep track of your fitness goals. If you have an iPhone or Blackberry with GPS, there’s even software available you can install on your phone to track your exercise in real time, which you can then upload to the site.

And when New Zealand’s inclement spring weather forces you indoors, technology can still help you keep on track. The Nintendo Wii has created a whole new market of fitness games. With Wii Fit and My Fitness Coach, your games console can become your personal trainer! Much cheaper than a gym membership. Check out www.nintendo.co.nz for more information.

It’s a changing world – no doubt about it! Technology is bridging gaps which, in the past, may have seemed too wide to close. Whether it is tools like Skype allowing people on opposite ends of the globe to talk, or sites like YouTube providing free access to a world of video and creative content, the internet surely has pride of place when it comes to technologies that have closed gaps.

Take the papacy for another example. We know that popes of the past were often distant, removed people who, due to their office and vocation were often not seen in public by the masses…unless being carried on a papal throne as part of their coronation. Then, bit by bit, as technology evolved, the gap between the common man and the pope started to close.

From the first address of Pope Pius XI on Vatican Radio in 1931, to Pope Pius XII in 1946 being the first pope to appear on TV – technology has brought us closer to a man who means so much to us as Catholics, but who lives so far away from New Zealand!

This trend continues with the features of pope2you.net, established earlier this year with the idea of tapping into the newer, ‘social media’ technologies in order to form stronger connections between Catholics around the world and Pope Benedict XVI. The site provides links to the Vatican YouTube site, as well as an application on Facebook which allows you to send virtual postcards to your friends, and another application for iPhones/iPods which provides video and audio of the pope’s addresses and other Vatican-related video.

It’s a great start into this area of new media and technologies, and one which should make Catholic geeks around the world happy that the Vatican is moving with these technological times.