At NCR(egister), Tim Drake has a good, comprehensive piece on online videocasting and Catholics. He pretty much covers all the bases, and ends with this:

Librarian Janice LaDuke of St. Paul, Minn., understands the power, accessibility and immediacy of such media. She credits the Holy Spirit and Internet resources such as Catholic Answers’ online forums and Catholic blogs for her return to the sacrament of reconciliation after a 20-year absence.

LaDuke grew up Catholic, but left in her early 20s for an evangelical church. She came back to the Church in the early 1990s, but admits that she was ignorant of what the Church taught.

Through the Internet, LaDuke ran across Catholics who knew their faith.

“I realized that my practice of what I thought was Catholicism wasn’t really Catholicism,” said LaDuke. “The people I ran into had quotes from Church documents and the Code of Canon Law to back them up. I realize I had nothing to back up what I was saying. The way I was practicing my faith wasn’t valid.”

LaDuke said that was the beginning of her reversion. After a gradual process, in early 2005 she returned to the practice of private confession.

“It was overpowering,” she said of the experience. “Afterward, when I received Communion, I felt for the first time in my whole life as if I was worthy to do so. I had been receiving Communion my whole life in a state of mortal sin and not caring.”

Last year, she started her own blog — The Recovering Dissident Catholic — in the hopes of reaching people whom she said are the way that she used to be.

“I’m not sure if it [Catholic online media] hadn’t existed, if I would be where I am at now,” she said. “Considering that I was surrounded in my daily life and parish with Catholics-in-name-only, the odds are that without the open world of the Internet, the odds of my reverting were probably slim.”