A few months ago, my parish priest asked if I could help out with the inventory of the Archdiocese’s archives. Thinking it didn’t entail much brainwork (hehehe!), I said yes. It was also a good exercise at exposing the very young members of the parish’s Social Communications Ministry (SCM) to ancient documents, in Spanish, and in the calligraphy of the friars.
Then I saw the boxes of old books – baptismal, wedding and death registries, policies of the Augustinian friars (yes, we were an Augustinian territory from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s) and everything in between. These are extremely precious and after doing a physical inventory, I had to take on the rest of the tasks alone. Huhuhu!
In general, they kept very good records and our job is to preserve them and to back them up with digitised copies.
Since the books come from the different parishes of the Archdiocese and have been exposed to different conditions, some books are still in pristine condition, some are deteriorating rapidly.
We have had discussions on how the Archives can better be improved – from the physical set-up to the pros and cons of unbinding for purposes of scanning.
Tomorrow, staff from the National Archives will be coming over to check the state of the books. Let’s see what they’ll recommend.
A few days ago, my friend Tanya sent me an e-mail calling my attention to an article online with the title The Church of the Poor. I didn’t realise it was something from the papers until I read this response by Jemy Gatdula early today.
Honestly, I didn’t put much thought to the article and typed off an off-the-top-of-my-head, even sarcastic response to Tanya, which is as follows:
I’m not impressed. Very simplistic argumentation.
I’ll be simple too. To be sustainable, one has to have capital. To
embark on and perpetuate the enterprises that it has, such as the
altruistic and just the operational costs of running a massive
organisation, one has to have capital.
So, what should the bishops do? Sell everything they have, give it to
the poor of this generation and then what? Expect manna from heaven to
sustain the next?
I thought it was one of those hoax-y, prophet of doom e-mail articles circulating around. I never thought it was from the opinion section of one of the country’s broadsheets. Oh well.
But now that I know, I’m glad Mr. Gatdula wrote a brief response. Hat tip to you, sir!
Fiesta time! Of course, I’ve been panicking, and with good reason! I don’t have a design bone in my body and I have to put up a window display.
Fortunately, I work well with my hands. Let’s see how far I’ll go this year but for starters, I’ve made several paper roses to put on the image of the saint. Initially, I was even apprehensive because it’s been more than 20 years since I was a little girl working on school craft projects but the internet saved me. I found this video tutorial by a nice Mum and little girl. It saved my neck!
It’s only Monday, the week just started but I’m looking at a busy and exciting week ahead. And the next three weeks for it’s fiesta time once more!
Not as toxic as holy week but we have much to do. The team has to finish working on the parish website to keep it up-to-date. We also have to come up with an audio-visual presentation for every day of the novena (that’s nine days!) on the different images of St. Rita. We need to rediscover the saint, so to speak. Ayayay!
Photo from the parish archives, most probably taken by my friend Weng Dizon
Last year, the Santa Rita de Cascia Fiesta Committee had several meaningful activities that were not of the usual. One of these was the Kalikha Santa Rita contest that sought to promote more devotions to St. Rita, our patron and saint of the impossible cases. Its second objective was to make parishioners more environmentally conscious by requiring only biodegradable materials to be used to decorate the altars. Houses which wanted to join the contest got their guidelines from the committee. Our house, however, was required to put up something, since it is one of the oldest houses along the processional route and it had a good vista from the street. We assembled a display but informed the committee that we were not joining the contest. (more…)
For this year’s Lent, we are producing one video that is based on the theme of each Penitential Service. The general theme is “Mabie Tamu Agyaman king Disyertu” which means “Alive in the Desert”.
All videos shall be uploaded in the parish YouTube channel. The first two (of six) for Lent are already there. Here’s the first:
I found out about the Vatican Meeting for Bloggers from Stef when she posted a link on Facebook. Like her, I really, really want to go! But I haven’t been a conscientious blogger in a very long time and I am not yet done overhauling our parish website.
The aim of the meeting, which is being organised by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Social Communications, is to allow for a dialogue between bloggers and Church representatives, to listen to the experiences of those who are actively involved in this arena, and to achieve a greater understanding of the needs of that community. The meeting will also allow for a presentation of some of the initiatives to engage with new media practitioners being taken by the Church, both in Rome and at the local level.
Proves very interesting since I work with our parish Social Communications Ministry. It would be a good venue to compare notes with others who work in the local level. Well, I hope there is a next time.
Perhaps, a bloggers meeting at the Vatican in the future will motivate me to work harder on this blog and the parish website. Hmmm…
Now, if process documentation can be put up in public, hahaha!
A few months ago, I wrote about some morsels of info I gathered from working on the parish songbook. In between then and now, I became involved in organising the Lenten video productions (a five minute AVP for each Friday of Lent) and then some.
Now that there is some semblance of order in those activities, I move on to overhauling and updating of our parish website. The current one runs on Mambo, which was found to be a difficult platform to use.
Early last year, I was already requested to help out with the website, but not wanting to be involved in content management and tinkering with the software, I politely declined. Having seen the website way before and knowing that it runs on Mambo made me all the more resolute to not be involved in it.
But things change and people move on to do other things. And so here I am, typing out an entry into one of the blogs that I have so long neglected while I am supposed to be manually migrating posts from the current Mambo-run site to a WordPress scratch blog.
Less than ten posts to migrate then we get into more fun tasks. Then we train the writers and so on and so forth…
There’s no contest. That person is no threat at all.
Well, as of now, that is. Sooner or later Person A will be plotting and scheming again. It’s not as if those will do much damage, but they’re extremely annoying! Grrrr!!!
Life looks more orderly now but it will be extremely busy. I need to delegate more responsibilities.
23 November 2011, Wednesday
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