Samantha Chin helped bring Pope Benedict XVI to YouTube and Facebook — literally.

As an intern for the Vatican’s Internet office, Ms. Chin researched different ways for the Roman Catholic Church to publicize the Pope’s message for annual World Communication Day, in May.

“My main job was to figure out new ways to reach a larger and a younger audience for this message to be delivered,” Ms. Chin said. “I immediately thought of ways to incorporate the Internet. I use it every day. I don’t think I could possibly live my life without it.”

And by January, the Communication Day message was posted on the Vatican’s YouTube site; a Facebook application called Pope2You, which allows users to send virtual postcards and get-well messages in five languages; and an iPhone application that distributes news in the Catholic world.

Ms. Chin, who received a bachelor’s degree in communications last month, was part of a Villanova University internship program that has been working for the past seven years to keep the Catholic Church up to date with multimedia tools and technology.

Over the past year, student interns and their professors have also begun a project creating virtual tours of several sites at the Vatican, the first of which — a tour of the Basilica of St. Paul — made its debut on the Vatican’s Web site last month.

Positive feedback from the first virtual-reality tour and interactions with the Villanova groups paved the way for the students to begin filming other sites, including an after-hours photo shoot of the Sistine Chapel, in March.

Samantha Coveleski, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Villanova last month, called her experience filming inside the chapel “breathtaking.”

“I had been there before and been inside the Sistine Chapel with the million other people,” Ms. Coveleski said. “But then to go back into the chapel at night knowing that nobody else was going to be there, you were really able to take in the artwork as it was designed to be witnessed.”

Professor Bryan Crable, director of Villanova’s communication department, said cardinals at the Vatican were hesitant at first to let the teams from Villanova have more access to the sites.

“They wanted to make sure that what we were able to present would accurately capture Michelangelo without distortion,” Mr. Crable said, adding that the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel will most likely offer a feature that allows viewers to click on different historically significant items and get background information on them.

“It’s just been a phenomenal experience for our students to be not only engaged in an internship that’s teaching them about multimedia, video production, and editing, but also to do it in such significant cultural, historical, religious spaces, and aesthetic spaces,” he said. —Marc Beja