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
------
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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