Google announced today that it is “delighted” at the debut of the new Vatican channel on YouTube. Concurrent with World Communication Day, Pope Benedict XVI celebrates today’s launch with twelve short videos on their new channel.

The launch video, “Vatican Communications HD,” strongly reminds us of the social studies films we saw at school in the 1970’s. You remember: the ones in which we celebrate “modern technologies,” like telephones and color tv.

Embedding of this, and the other Vatican videos is “disabled by request,” so the best we can do is give you this pretty screen capture (right) and a link. (Marshall Kirkpatrick, at ReadWriteWeb, muses that “Perhaps he doesn’t see it as a way to talk to nonbelievers on other sites…. presumably the Vatican doesn’t want the Pope’s videos showing up in snarky blog posts like this, or worse.”)

In a statement celebrating World Communications Day, the Holy Father says of the social communications media, that “the media have acquired extraordinary potential, while raising new and hitherto unimaginable questions and problems,” and that it “exercis[es] a negative influence on people’s consciences and choices and definitively conditioning their freedom and their very lives.”

Toward that end, Pope Benedict says, “The new media – telecommunications and internet in particular – are changing the very face of communication; perhaps this is a valuable opportunity to reshape it, to make more visible, as my venerable predecessor Pope John Paul II said, the essential and indispensable elements of the truth about the human person.”

Thus the YouTube channel.

The initial batch of twelve videos include highlights of a recent baptismal service at the Sistine Chapel, a blessing of the lambs whose wool will be used in ceremonial garments later this year, and even a video with the Pope’s musings on the media as a voice in the service of peace, and another about the Internet as “a new way to speak of God.”

Vatican Channel content is available in English, Spanish, Italian, and German language.