The terms defined here are the working vocabulary of the Formation framework. Some are borrowed from the Catholic tradition, some from communications and editorial practice, some are proper to True Light Digital. Where a term has been given a particular meaning within Formation, the definition below is the one the framework uses, regardless of how the word is used elsewhere.
This page is updated as the vocabulary grows. It exists for readers who arrive at a mid-series short read without having read the cornerstones, and for readers who want to check that the word they think they are reading is the word being used.
Entries are grouped thematically. Within each group, terms are listed in the order in which someone new to the framework is likeliest to meet them.
The function and its parts
Communications Champion. A function, not a person, and not a job title. The Communications Champion is the work of communicating what God is doing through a parish, taken seriously, named, and supported. In a large parish the function may be distributed across several people; in a small parish it may be one person; in most English parishes it has been quietly held for years by the parish secretary without anyone calling it what it is. Pillar 1 of the Formation framework is the extended treatment of this idea.
Originator. One of the three flavours the Communications Champion function can take. An originator is the person closest to a ministry or an event, who knows what is happening and why it matters. The SVP coordinator originating a note about the food bank appeal; the catechist originating a reflection from the children’s First Communion preparation. Originators generate the raw material of parish communications.
Curator. The second flavour of the function, and in most parishes the most important. The curator is the person who receives what originators have produced, judges what belongs in the parish’s public voice, shapes it, times it, and decides whether and when to publish. In most English parishes the curator is the parish secretary, whether or not that has been named. The curator’s work is editorial in the proper sense: selection, shaping, restraint.
Producer. The third flavour. The producer turns curated content into finished output: designing the newsletter, posting to social media, updating the website, laying out the printed bulletin. In smaller parishes producer and curator are the same person; in larger parishes they are separate, and the separation is usually healthy.
Commissioning. The act of formally naming a person into the Communications Champion function, usually by the parish priest, usually in writing, often through the Role Description template (T1). Commissioning matters because it reframes the work from “a favour someone is doing” into “a lay apostolate the parish is supporting.” The language of commissioning is theological, not merely administrative.
The rhythm
Liturgical time. The Church’s own sense of time, expressed through the liturgical year and its seasons. Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time again. Liturgical time is the parish’s real time. Calendar quarters (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4), budget cycles, and weekly planning horizons are borrowed time, imported from contexts that do not share the Church’s rhythm.
Ordinary Time. The long stretches of the liturgical year that sit outside the high seasons. Most of the year, in fact. Ordinary Time is not the absence of season; it is its own season, with its own form. Much of Pillar 2 is concerned with honouring Ordinary Time as Ordinary Time rather than treating it as filler between the high moments.
Three seasons. The working pace for any significant parish change. Shorthand for “three liturgical seasons is the honest minimum for any change that affects how people communicate, work, or relate to the parish.” A year, roughly. Sometimes more. The principle is elaborated in Pillar 3 and worked through in detail in T7 and S8. The shorter form is: patience is cheaper than speed.
Rhythm. The practice of letting communications follow the parish’s actual pace rather than imposing an external tempo on it. Rhythm is the Pillar 2 concern. It is not slowness; it is appropriate speed, which varies by season.
Restraint. The Pillar 2 companion to rhythm. The practice of publishing less, more carefully, with more space around each thing. The parish that has learned restraint produces a Friday newsletter with four well-considered items rather than fourteen equivalent ones.
The practice
Syndicate-once. The operational principle that any given piece of content should live in exactly one place, with every other appearance being a link to that place rather than a copy of it. The bishop’s letter lives on the diocesan site; the parish bulletin links to it rather than retyping it. Syndicate-once reduces duplication, shortens the parish secretary’s week, and keeps authoritative sources authoritative. Elaborated in T6.
Submission route. The agreed path by which originators pass content to the curator. Usually: a single email address, a single deadline (Tuesday evening for Friday’s newsletter), a brief form if the parish has one, and a clear understanding of what the curator does with what is submitted. The submission route is the parish’s working protocol, made explicit. Handed out on one page (T5) to every ministry lead.
Syndication. The practice of placing one piece of content in multiple channels by linking rather than duplicating. A blog post on the parish website is syndicated to the Friday newsletter through a short summary and a link. The single canonical location remains the blog post.
Editorial vetting. The curator’s review of a piece of content before publication. Not editing for grammar, though that may happen. Vetting in the proper sense: checking for safeguarding considerations, consent, pastoral weight, appropriate register, alignment with the parish’s voice. Operationalised in T4.
The discernment
Discernment. Used in Formation in its Ignatian sense, adapted to parish communications. Discernment is the work of distinguishing what is of God from what is not, in a particular situation, with a particular weight. It requires attention, interiority, and the willingness to hold several goods in tension before choosing. Pillar 4 is the extended treatment of discernment as a parish communications discipline.
Hesitance. The disposition that discernment requires. Hesitance is not indecision; it is the practice of pausing before speech, of not publishing reflexively, of taking the time to ask whether the thing about to be communicated is the thing that should be communicated. Hesitance is named explicitly in Pillar 4 and dramatised in S5.
The pause. The practical form hesitance takes. The moment of putting a submission down and picking up the phone to check with the family before publishing. The decision to wait a week before posting a piece that is not yet settled. The Wednesday afternoon in the parish office where the communications work did not happen, because pausing was the work. Most of the parish’s best communications decisions live in this negative space.
Guardrails. The written policies, checklists, and agreed boundaries that make the pause reliable. A parish can depend on an individual’s judgment, but a parish with guardrails is a parish where the right judgment happens even when the individual is tired, on leave, or replaced. The Pillar 4 downloads (T4, T8, T9) are the framework’s main guardrails.
Custodia linguae. Latin for guardianship of the tongue. An ancient Catholic ascetical practice, part of the tradition of custodia (guarding of the senses and the heart). In the Formation framework, custodia linguae names the spiritual lineage of the discipline that Pillar 4 articulates: the parish curator practising guardianship of the tongue, at the institutional scale, on behalf of the Church’s speech.
The Eighth Commandment. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. In Catholic moral theology, the Eighth Commandment governs truthfulness in speech about others, including reputation, confidentiality, and the honour due to a person’s good name. Formation invokes the Eighth Commandment specifically in Pillar 4’s treatment of what a parish should and should not publish about named living people. See S13 for the worked cases.
The posture
Honouring. The disposition Pillar 3 describes as the precondition for any parish change. Honouring names what already works in a parish, and who has made it work, before proposing change. Honouring is not sentiment; it is a discernible practice, expressed in specific conversations with specific long-serving volunteers before any proposal is written.
Invitation, not buy-in. The Pillar 3 shorthand for how change happens in parishes. “Buy-in” is a corporate frame that imagines the parish as a set of stakeholders to be managed; “invitation” is a parish frame that imagines the parish as a body of the baptised to be invited. The register is different, and the register changes everything about how the change is actually conducted.
Reading silence. The practice of noticing when a parish has gone quiet on a change, and hearing that silence as communication rather than as absence. Elaborated in S11. Parishes often decline by going quiet rather than by raising objections, and the practitioner who cannot read silence will push through to a completed project that fails on the other side.
The theology
Baptismal apostolate. The teaching, rooted in the Second Vatican Council and reaffirmed in subsequent magisterial documents, that every baptised person participates in the mission of the Church by virtue of baptism itself. In the Formation framework, this is the theological ground of the Communications Champion function: lay communications work is not a volunteer administrative task but a particular expression of the baptismal apostolate, to which the parish owes real support.
Priestly, prophetic, and kingly work. The threefold office of Christ, shared in a particular way by the baptised, in which the Christian life itself participates. Parish communications work, at its deepest, participates in all three: priestly in its intercessory dimension, prophetic in its truthful speech, kingly in its ordering of the parish’s life. Named explicitly in Pillar 1 and picked up again in Pillar 3.
The long view. The Church’s characteristic posture in time, shaped by the fact that she is older than any present controversy and will outlast it. Formation invokes the long view particularly in Pillar 4, where the decision not to respond publicly to a short-term controversy is grounded in the Church’s confidence that most disputes subside when they are not fed.
Sacramental economy. The broader order within which parish communications sits. Parish communications is not the centre of parish life; the sacraments are. Communications serves the sacramental life, points to it, and resists any tendency to replace it with its own visibility. Named in Pillar 4’s discussion of homilies, condolences, and prayer requests, all of which sit downstream of the sacramental economy rather than parallel to it.
A note on what this glossary is not
This glossary is deliberately short. It defines the terms Formation uses as Formation uses them. It does not attempt to be a general dictionary of Catholic theology, nor of communications practice, nor of church administration. For any term, the fuller treatment lives in the cornerstone essays and supporting resources, which are linked below.
If a term you expected to find here is missing, it may be because the Formation framework has not yet needed it, or because we have chosen to let the longer work carry the meaning rather than compressing it into a short definition. The glossary grows with the library. Suggestions are welcome.
The full Formation framework, including four cornerstone essays on the Communications Champion, Rhythm & Restraint, Invitation & Patience, and Guardrails & Discernment, is free at truelight.digital/formation.