(Rivista Internazionale - December 1998: An epochal turning point - 4/5)

Rome, Rhodes House. H.E. the Grand Chancellor, Amb. Conte Don Carlo Marullo di Condojanni, during a religious ceremony in the Palatine Chapel.

Now let us come to the agenda of today’s meeting: the famous Jubilee of the Order. Famous because it has been talked about for a long time and now we have finally arrived at the crucial moment of its preparation. What is being asked of the Communications Delegates? To disseminate this news world-wide and encourage the participation of the greatest possible number of Knights. The Jubilee will start in Malta in December this year with a solemn reunion, and there will also be a meeting of the Presidents of National Associations and Ambassadors. This could be the first world meeting of Ambassadors, since I do not think any have been held before. There will then be two days of work during which it will be possible to compare different opinions. I hope the debate will be open, so we can obtain an idea not only of the will but also of the ability of the Order’s members to take an interest and participate in the solution of problems; problems which do not only regard the Magistry but also all the Order’s bodies and even the individual Delegations.
The second event of the Jubilee will take place in April in Rome which will be celebrating the Order in Via Condotti since the Associazione di Via Condotti will be devoting a whole month to festivities. Then there will be the Chapter General, the solemn Papal Audience, an event on the Aventine Hill on 25 June with an exhibition of paintings, and the pilgrimage to Rhodes in October. We were hoping to make one to the Holy Places as well, but this is still uncertain at the moment. However, the Jubilee will have a solemn conclusion at the end of 1999. It is to be hoped that we can do it on Rhodes but we are still not sure of this. But in this regard, the Grand Magistry, when opening the Order’s Jubilee Year on Malta, will test the effective capacity of involving all the international media in the news of the Order’s ninth centenary. We shall see! However, on the level of Associations and Grand Priories, alongside the many Communication Delegates here today, I would like us to find a direct link with a local media representative who could in one way or another directly channel communications from the centre and vice versa. Why do I say this? Because the Magistry has seen how the communications group functions and how the Secretariat is represented through the Delegates. The result is not encouraging because the communications transmitted almost never find an echo in the media of the various countries. We launched an important news item in 1994, that of the Order’s admission to the United States. We had only five or six small mentions in the media of the countries where we have Communication Delegates. We repeated this experiment with the flash letter, with the same results. It is true that the flash letters are distributed among the Knights but this is not their only aim; the aim is for every individual association to share its life, and thus the life of the Magistry, with the community in which it operates. This is why I think this contact with the local media is urgently necessary.

Honduras. Some volunteers of ECOM arriving in the areas hit by hurricane Mitch.

The Communication Secretary and President of the Communication Board must find a direct link with the main international newspapers; if not the discourse is only made and listened to by us, and we will not achieve anything with regards to the Order’s image. If we do not have an external image of the Order in all countries, we will never have an effective tool for the fight against the Bogus Orders. It is of little use for the Presidents, Grand Priors and individual Knights to send a series of complaints and notices about Bogus Orders to Rome if an Association is not able to have a communication published by the papers like the one which came out in the Osservatore Romano a few days ago, explaining not only what the other orders are not but also what the Order is. It will be very difficult for the Bogus Orders to continue if systematically every month, or every two months, the papers which can be reached by the Associations and Grand Priories carry news of real investitures of Knights and the activities of the Order world-wide. If this is done the Communication Board will be satisfied; if this is not done, the problem will not be solved by making a complaint every so often about a Bogus Order issuing a passport.
Public opinion must be informed. This is also the aim of the Communication Board, the Secretariat and the individual Delegates. But how can the individual Delegates move if they do not have a media representative who manages in some way to keep in contact with the main newspapers? I thus invite Delegates to suggest to us names of top quality journalists accredited in the various countries, so that they can be approached, so that in one way or another a relationship can be established, also possibly making them Magistral Knights.
Because in the end there is a part of international journalism which is healthy, which is also Catholic and which could be extremely useful for us, just as we could be useful to them on the level of spiritual formation.


back to previous page
next page
back to summary