2848 SC Delegates EAO
austraLasia #2848
 

"Mabuhay!", a word from our sponsor

ALABANG (Manila): 27 April 2011 -- Yoda, the renowned and powerful Jedi Master in the Star Wars universe told the wishy-washy young apprentice Luke Skywalker in the episode 'The Empire Strikes Back': "Do or do not, there is no try". This means that when a critical task is involved we should not only attempt it, but also accomplish it, or not at all.
    This is especially true of our apostolic activity in the new media. We have to cease being timid. We have to be incisive. Otherwise we become accidents on the high-speed digital super-highway which young people today inhabit.
    We thank our Social Communications Department in Rome for choosing the Philippines North Province to host this meeting. We say in the Philippines, 'Mabuhay!'. It literally means 'long live'.
    It is our expression of welcoming guests and showing hospitality. It is also our prayer that those who come for the meeting may return to our places pulsating with new life as we, in the words of Benedict XVI, ' set sail on the digital sea fearlessly, confronting open navigation with the same enthusiasm that has steered the Barque of the Church for 2,000 years
'.
    Fr Eli Cruz, Provincial Superior Philippines North and Guam, Delegation of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands
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They have come from all corners of the Region. What better place to learn to be street-smart on the super-highway than Tuloy, where a five minute chat with one newly-empowered young human being, or a massed self-organised and synchronised performance of 200 of them can teach one more about communications, the preventive system, and why we're doing all of this anyway, than a mountain of manuals.
    The first day has been an opportunity to share strengths, challenges and opportunities around the region - and there are plenty of all of them. A solid study of the renewed SSCS follows. There is already an awareness that one province's strengths can support another province's challenges; that what cannot be achieved alone could be achieved together. The trick will be to learn how to do that within existing structures, and within a region that has already demonstrated its growth in unity with diversity. If communicators cannot do this, and cannot bring the very tools they work with to bear on the challenge, then who else can? It is a case of do, or do not, there is no try!

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