Aims to Offer World a Word of Hope
The press and television channels have a new ally in finding information about the Holy Land — a multimedia center in Jerusalem.
The Franciscan Multimedia Center was inaugurated Saturday with the aim of offering information about the area and the message of the holy sites, explained Father Dobromir Jasztal, an official of the Franciscan custody of the Holy Land. The center was welcomed as part of Terra Santa College.
The center has been entrusted to the Brazilian community Cançao Nova, whose mission consists in evangelizing through new media.
Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, custos of the Holy Land, said that establishing the multimedia center required four years and significant economic problems.
This center, he said, is "a center in the heart of a land that calls on us, in the first place Christians — all Christians, not just Catholics — who can claim not so much great and powerful media of social communication, but a very close-knit network of newspapers, televisions and small groups that are effective in reaching the hearts of the people in widely differing places of the planet."
Father Pizzaballa said the center was born "to communicate from the Holy Land a word of hope."
Maria de Lourdes Nunes, of the Community Cançao Nova in the Holy Land, invoked the intercession of St. Francis and St. Clare.
"The challenge is great and we need help," she said. "We have means, ideas, creativity and a little imagination. But you are witnesses to history. You are the good news that we wish to show from the Holy Land."
