With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI announced on February 11 and effective on February 28, our office at Pilot New Media and the whole Catholic Media Secretariat at the Archdiocese of Boston went into top gear. Part of our mission is to provide formation and evangelization through the use of media and when you have the biggest news story in the world–especially when it happens in unprecedented ways–we step up to help explain and explore what it all means for our Catholic audience.

So what have we been doing? Pilot New Media not only manages all the new media accounts of the Archdiocese of Boston, we also provide support for The Good Catholic Life radio program. The host of that show is Scot Landry, the Secretary for Catholic Media, and he is traveling to Rome to report on the events happening there from the personal perspective of a Boston Catholic on pilgrimage to the papal conclave.

Our intent is to cover the historic events using all available new media: blogs, social media, radio, podcasts, videos. This requires our team headed to Rome to be loaded down with all kinds of equipment and we thought we’d share what our colleague George Martell is bringing with him to Rome. You’ll see in the photo below nearly all of the equipment that George will be carrying with him.

And here is a list of what you see:

• Canon 5D Mk III with a 70–200mm lens
• Canon 1D
• 35mm wide angle lens
• 50mm prime lens
• 2  Canon Vixia HF G10
• Zoom H4n digital audio recorder
• Dynamic XLR microphone
• Two sets of lavalier microphones
• Livestream Broadcaster (for live video streaming)
• microphone cables, gaffer tape, battery packs, memory cards, and more.

What you don’t see are George’s MacBook Pro, iPhone 4S, and iPad 3, plus a MiFi mobile hostpost from XCom Global.

All of this equipment will be sending radio broadcasts for The Good Catholic Life, plus twice-daily minute-long updates for the Station of the Cross radio network; YouTube videos with longer updates, interviews, and pilgrim experiences; live video streaming at BostonCatholicLive; photos of all these events for Flickr.com/BostonCatholic; daily blog posts at TheGoodCatholicLife.com; and updates for our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Of course, there’s also all the great content coming from our colleagues at CatholicTV as well. We got it all covered!

We’ll report back here after George and Scot return from Rome to tell you how it all worked out.