By M.Christian

YNOT – In a case of what some might call divine intervention, the Vatican dodged a dot-xxx domain bullet. For a while it looked like an “unknown party” had registerd Vatican.xxx, and mainstream media reported the Catholic hierarchy was more than a tad nervous about what might be afoot.

Venerable international new service Reuters was the first to sound the alarm, with TechCrunch picking up the banner shortly afterward.

“There is no information on the purchaser, and the whois info simply points to the ICM Registry, which is holding the domain (potentially until 2021),” a TechCrunch article by Devin Coldewey noted. “It may be that some pious soul saw that it was available and purchased it for permanent inactivity or eventual forwarding to the Vatican’s actual site. Or it could be an opportunistic pornographer or domain squatter who snapped it up for nefarious purposes. The Vatican denies purchasing the site (of course, they deny a lot of things), so after a certain period it would be up for grabs.”

Luckily for the Vatican, CNN’s BeliefBlog got word from above — or at least from dot-xxx boss ICM Registry — that the domain was taken off the table from the get-go.

“Vatican.xxx is a name that is on the permanent reserve list, so it was pulled out of the registry before the launch,” ICM spokeswoman Jocelyn Johnson told CNN. “No one is able to purchase that name.

“ICANN, required ICM to work with a governmental advisory committee, and countries from around the world were invited to submit a list of names on the reserve list — from political leaders to singers,” she added. “Something like the Vatican would obviously be seen as socially sensitive.”

The existence of a list of domains blocked because of potential historical, political or religious sensitivity has been reported several times in by both adult and mainstream media, but evidently the Vatican — which is not technologically ignorant — somehow never got the memo. Reportedly, the church hierarchy fell into a bit of a snit when Vatican officials went to register the name but found it already taken.

“They probably didn’t realize there was a list of names that had been blocked, and if perhaps no one among the team there registered it or had done it themselves, then perhaps they thought that it was done by someone else,” Johnson told CNN.

Once the little misunderstanding was ironed out, church officials had nothing but praise for ICANN and ICM.

The incident showed “that people are taking responsibility in recognizing that anything can be used for ill as well as for good,” Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the U.S. Conference of Bishops said. “And you have to take precautions that our technology is not used for ill.”

Image: A 2009 ad for Antonio Federici’s Gelato Italiano brand was banned in Italy because it eroticized Catholic clergy.