Archdiocese to hold Children's Congress on Media Education
The Jaro Archdiocesan Women's Desk and the Jaro Archdiocesan Commission on Family Life will hold a Children's Congress on Media Education on Sunday May 20, 2007. The congress is in relation to the 41st World Communication Day.
The congress is the first ever to be held in the Archdiocese of Jaro. It is an offshoot of the recently concluded 3rd Diocesan Synod of Jaro and the first Msgr. Jose Buenaflor Memorial Media Forum. It will start from 8:00 a.m. until 3 p.m. at the La Isabelita Hall, Jaro Metropolitan Cathedral.
The congress which is also in participation of the Katesismo sa Kahanginan Apostolate, Ang Dios Gugma Community and Ang Dulot ni Sta. Ana is the archdiocese's answer to the challenge made by Pope Benedict XVI. The congress is an attempt to give opportunity to the children to be heard in media. The participants are children and youth aging from 10-17 years old. Each parish or lay organization are allowed to send five participants because of the limited resources for the said congress.
In his message for the World Communications Day, the Holy Father called on the church to form the children through the media, to form them to respond appropriately to the media and to form media to create positive things in children.
The objectives of the congress are to gather children with special talents and creative writing skills and having exposures and perspectives on television and the internet, create consciousness and sensitivity among the major television networks operating in Iloilo, make the children create in various artistic or literary forms such as poster, slogan stories, poems and other core messages on how or what they want to educate them, and find points of convergence and consolidation of efforts and initiatives of existing Church media and forms of Children's Advocacy Groups.
Some of the activities in the congress are the viewing and critiquing of a segment of ABS-CBN's TV Patrol Iloilo and Ratsada of GMA-6, story telling (Biblical/Catechetical), lecture-forum on the use/misuse of the internet and on-the-spot contests for poster making, slogan making, comics strip and poetry writing.