Construction of online communities based on consolidated face-to-face communities. The case of Catholic Church on the internet

The concept of community has broadened since the emergence of the digital era. Factors of time and space are no longer influential in the process of building a digital common interest group. What do we need to create digital communities? How do they maintain themselves? How do they combine their digital existence with their possible real presence? The main goal of this article is to analyze the process of building consolidated digital communities. This will require close study of the elements required to start them up and keep them going, eventually revealing how strong real communities manage to exist in the digital sphere. Our sample is the global catholic community. We will analyze the 19 most relevant websites dealing with this religion, which have been monitored during three years.