“SATU setengah, Satu setengah, untuk gereja”, you can hear someone promoting at the front of the church weekly. (Sacred Heart Cathedral) The promoters go after the parishioners sometimes and you see a lot of them avoid them or use the other entrances into the church. What a way to promote our Catholic Sabah!
The parishioners who bought feel cornered, coerced to buy the paper, not because they want to read it but more out of charity (since it is for the church-donation sort of) or just being polite. How pathetic.. We really are not aware of how fortunate we are, to be able to print our own Catholic newspaper. Do we know it is not easy to get a license to print a newspaper? How many Christian churches have that privilege? It is high time we evaluate this invaluable treasure of ours.
I have a very interesting session with the Associate Editor of Catholic Sabah, Peter Zeter Kombiong last week. He took over the job about almost a year ago. We met over lunch by chance during a Caritas workshop. He bought the ‘Richness of the Catholic Heritage’ from me. Somehow, we just started talking about the Catholic Sabah newspaper. In the midst of all these, he asked if I could contribute to this newspaper. After a day of pondering, I decided to have a go at it and here I am, starting the ‘KUPI-KUPI CORNER’ in Catholic Sabah. It will be a corner for everything: Issues people share over coffee, interviews, testimonies, conversion stories, just anything worth pondering to build up our faith or even challenge our belief. Who knows? Some of you might want to use this column to express your ideas and view? You can always reach me and are always welcome to do so.
Right, back to what I wanted to write as my first article.
Peter was telling me that subscriptions to Catholic Sabah in recent months has been dropping. As commodity prices keep increasing, needless to say the cost of production of our newspapers also takes its toll. Soon your RM1.50 contribution will not be enough to cover the cost of production. At this moment, parishioners are already complaining that RM1.50 is too expensive.
Peter told me something about the objectives of Catholic Sabah which I never knew, and I don’t think many of us are not aware of it too. Just what are the objectives of our Catholic Sabah? I was told that the thrust of Catholic Sabah is “Commitment to the New Evangelization, Transmitting Faith.” This is written on the first page top-right corner. To do so, the newspaper is divided into the following main sections:
1. World Catholic News: highlights our universal church’s direction including Pope’s messages, key activities from the Vatican so that the whole Church moves as a united body.
2. Local Bishops columns: information from the office of our three Bishops from the three dioceses in Sabah. They use this to communicate their vision, mission and direction of shepherding their flocks.
3. Editorial reflections: Weekly Sunday readings reflections from local or abroad.
4. Home news: serves to encourage each other in our journey of faith through the various activity reports from groups in different parishes.
5. Pastoral: Issues or approaches being discussed at length to provoke thinking, offer new ideas, provide encouragement
6. Focus: another interesting feature which invites articles on faith related issues, highlight certain needs or events and the like.
7. Youth and children section: where the youth have their say and their activities.
8. Themes: Each month there is a main theme running through the articles. Usually it reflects the universal Church’s intentions for the month. For example in the March issue the theme is on “Family issues”
To top it all, it caters for four language groups. How inclusive can you get.
So it is not a newspaper to support the church. It is a newspaper to build up our faith. Your RM1.50 is so well spent when we regard it as a biweekly faith formation sessions at the comfort of our home. Perhaps it is good to compare the amount of time we spend reading the secular news from our secular newspapers, or media that cater to our temporal needs with the amount of time we spend reading things that lead to eternal life.
Can I challenge you today that we will buy and read our very own Catholic Sabah as a mean to help us to increase our faith, to make our journey to holiness easier through the written examples of others? Better still before reading, say a little prayer and ask God to speak through all those writings. Thank you.
