Subject: 'austraLasia' # 334

MAKING WAVES IN THE PACIFIC: UNDA/OCIC MEETING

Julian Fox

SUVA: 28th January -- The Feast of St. Peter Chanel, the Pacific's martyr-saint, falls significantly in the middle of the gathering of the UNDA/OCIC Pacific Region in Suva this week, a meeting attended for the first time by Salesian Director of Catholic Communications in the Solomon Islands, Fr. Ambrose Pereira.

Salesians are active in social communications at the grass-roots level in many parts of the world, but they also find themselves represented at varying levels of the global organisation of Catholic media consciousness. Salesian Fr. C.M. Paul is the all-India President of UNDA/OCIC.

In informal discussion with the world-level administrators of UNDA/OCIC gathered in Suva with representatives of a dozen Pacific countries, the hope has been expressed that the Salesians, through their central dicastery of Social Communications, can play an even stronger formal role in UNDA/OCIC planning.

The Pacific region has its own president, Mr. Bill Falekaono of Tonga, and secretary Mr. Peter Thomas of Melbourne, Australia. Another Australian, Fr. Peter Malone MSC, is the world president of OCIC. He presently resides in London.

'Making waves' of the telecommunication kind is a feature of the Pacific Island sense of common identity, in their scattered physical context - a feature that UNDA/OCIC organization recognizes and supports via the Local Church in each little nation. As Fr. Pierre Belanger SJ, UNDA secretary, aptly put it to Pacific delegates: "We are no more just using media, but living in a culture that is totally media-centred, and we ought to swim within this media world".