World Youth Day Reporters

22 April 2008

In preparation for World Youth Day (WYD), two young pilgrims from the Clifton Diocese joined 15 others from dioceses across England and Wales at a training event in Liverpool.

Antonia Fafiolu and Rachel Manning from the Holy Family parish in Patchway, Bristol are our World Youth Day communications officers.

They’ve just come back from the training weekend in Liverpool, where they learned how to write a press release; put together a podcast and handle a video camera. They also learned how to interview and be interviewed.

Rachel and Antonia took part in a live BBC radio interview reporting back on the weekend.  They chatted on ‘Sunday Starts’ with Trevor Fry from BBC Radio Bristol and BBC Somerset.

Trevor’s sent us a recording of the interview and you can listen to it in the multimedia panel on the right.  You can listen to ‘Sunday Starts’ in full from the BBC Bristol website. 

The Archbishop of Liverpool, Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, opened the weekend and celebrated Mass for the World Youth Day communications officers during which they were commissioned to, “go out and preach the good news”. The weekend began by setting their role as World Youth Day Communicators in the context of evangelisation.

One of the World Youth Day communications officers, Colm Cahill said, “The course was very informative and certainly gave me an inspiration to do more on the subject of evangelising the youth of today. I look forward to getting down there and truly putting it into practice.”

There will be another World Youth Day communications officers training day in London next month.

Over 13 dioceses will be sending World Youth Day communications officers to Sydney. The training program has been devised by the Catholic Communications Network (CCN), in collaboration with the Catholic Agency to Support Evangelisation (CASE), the National Office for Vocation (NOV), the Catholic Youth Services (CYS) and the Archdiocese of Liverpool.

This news story release was put together during the course of the weekend by several of the young World Youth Day Communications Officers.

In July 2008, the 23rd World Youth Day will be held in Sydney Australia. 1500 young adults will travel to Sydney from the UK alone.

The theme of the 2008 World Youth Day is “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and you will become my witnesses.

Tomorrow, cliftondiocese.com brings you an audio report featuring Rachel Manning.

World Youth Day is the largest youth event in the world.  It takes pace in Sydney from 15 to 20 July and around 20 young people from throughout the Clifton Diocese are taking part. You can meet them in our podcast series.

Comprehensive information about WYD is provided by the Bishops’ Conference recently redesigned website.

We previewed the WYD media training event last week.