Over the past 10 years, Hollywood marketing guru Robert Thorne has been responsible for licensing the images of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Hilary Duff, helping transform the tween sensations into billion-dollar brands.
And so it might seem unlikely that his next project involves the Vatican.
Next month, Mr. Thorne will help launch the first iPhone app directly affiliated with the Holy See, a series of web videos called "Daily Sermonettes with Father Michael Manning" that will be available for purchase on iTunes.
The app, which will be dubbed into six different languages, is part of the Vatican's new-media strategy, one that has also seen the Pope take to Facebook and YouTube in an effort to win over the faithful at a time when the Roman Catholic Church is besieged by almost unprecedented scandal.
"I don't do anything that I don't think will be staggeringly successful," Mr. Thorne said of the app Tuesday. "People want content that not only conveys a message but makes them feel good."
The Catholic Church is in desperate need of a positive message, as allegations of child sexual abuse have emerged in the United States, Ireland, Germany and beyond, and court documents have implicated high ranking members of the faith in apparent attempts to cover up or ignore the crimes.
But critics of the church say Vatican 2.0 is no substitute for Vatican II, and that the embattled religion should be communicating real reform instead of simply adopting new technology.
"They're using Internet videos and they think this is enough," said Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania who writes for the website Religion Dispatches.
The iPhone app is the latest in the Vatican's online strategy, and was created at the request of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, which partnered with Mr. Thorne, former CEO of the Olsen twins' Dualstar Entertainment.
In Rome, they have also launched a web site called Pope2You (www.pope2you.net), which features links to the Pope's Facebook page and electronic Easter cards with messages from Scripture.
The Vatican Television Center and Vatican Radio have launched H2Onews, which provides streaming church information in eight languages, available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
And on the Vatican YouTube channel, visitors can watch videos of Papal addresses, including one entitled "The Pope to the victims of abuse," which was posted on March 19 and had more than 10,000 views.
In May, the Vatican will mark World Communications Day, which the Pope has given the theme: The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word.
But Ms. Butler said the Vatican's new methods of communication have not modernized the message, and that the abuse scandal requires transparency, not just publicly streamed apologies.
"He's a theologian who can debate the use of a single word for two days," she said. "That's not what is required any more. He needs to say we screwed up and we will fix this."
During his Palm Sunday address, the Pope appeared to push back at the critics, saying that "Jesus leads us toward the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion."
Ms. Butler said the Vatican fails to appreciate that the Internet allows information to be transmitted quickly and constantly, whether it likes it or not.
"It happens at such a quick pace that church leaders can't get a handle on it," she said. "The Vatican is a giant, slow-moving organization - they don't even know what an RSS feed is."
In an editorial this week, the National Catholic Register in the United States said new technology has changed what the faithful expect from the leader of the church.
"No longer can the Vatican simply issue papal messages - subject to nearly infinite interpretations and highly nuanced constructions - that are passively 'received' by the faithful," it wrote. "No longer can secondary Vatican officials, those who serve the Pope, issue statements and expect them to be accepted at face value."
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary, said she was shocked to hear the Pope recently characterize sexual abuse as a suffering for the church and him personally.
"It's a suffering of the children," she said. "If you can't get your arms around that, the rest of the world is going to explain it to you. That is the strength of social media and the Internet."