World Communications Day

Sunday 24th May was World Communications Day, where the Church reminds us to use whatever means of communication to bring the message of Christ to the world, and to use it to foster closer relationships among each other.

The theme for this year is "New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a Culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship.". You can read up more about it in the Pope's Message.

At the Parish of Christ the King where I'm doing my pastoral attachment this year, a group was set up to see what can be done to promote this awareness of World Communications Day to the Parish.

Firstly we decided to do a website with links to various online resources that people can use to grow in their faith --> www.christtheking.com.sg/wcs09

Next we decided to encourage people to send out messages of love and blessings to their friends and loved ones. And since SMS is the most widely used means of communication these days, we printed out 10 different SMS messages onto bookmarks and distributed it at all the sunday masses --> Click here to See SMS messages

This was my favourite design

We also set up a Facebook group for the parishioners to join, with the idea of using it to communicate and promote the various parish activities through it. To date nearly 250 members have joined.

Lastly, we conducted a survey on how people are using various communication technologies and how the Church can more effectively use it to reach out and communicate.

Today as I read this week's issue of the Catholic News I saw that Vatican also did something similar on World Communications Day.

They have a website www.pope2you.net, a facebook app through which you can send the Pope's messages to your friends. Only thing we didn't do was a youtube channel, iPhone app and a wiki site. Well not too bad for a small parish compared to Vatican.