…As ACI Africa celebrates 5th anniversary
Most Rev. Emmanuel Adetoyese Badejo, President of the Pan African Episcopal Committee for Social Communication (CEPACS) and Catholic Bishop of Oyo has said that communication without God in the heart of the communicator is devoid of the divine which is a constitutive element to the profession and media ministry in the Church. Bishop Badejo disclosed this while giving the keynote address at the 5th anniversary celebration of Association for Catholic Information in Africa (ACI Africa), tagged, “Celebrating ACI Africa at 5: Heads in Heaven with feet firmly on the ground”, held recently at JJ MacCarthy Centre, Riverside Drive, Nairobi, Kenya.
The Bishop noted that without communication, there is no evangelisation and there is no Church because communication is constitutive to the proclamation of the Gospel and the mission of the Church. He said the Church desired media entities which would support its evangelisation mission, project its pastoral profile as family of God, and promote a healthy synodal exchange in the Church all over the continent while helping Africa to tell her own story to the world. He congratulated Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) and all its visionaries who, by establishing ACI Africa, acknowledged the importance of the testimony and pastoral experience of the Church in Africa and so, invested commendably in amplifying the voice of the Church.
According to him, “The validity of that decision is clearly manifested in the contribution of Africa to the ongoing process of the Synod on Synodality, its witness to the sanctity of life and the sacrament of marriage, not to mention the importance of bringing cherished African values of solidarity and the joy of living to the entire world. “Within these five eventful years, ACI Africa has made good progress, reporting events in Africa and its Islands from a Catholic perspective, in English and French, and looking to do so soon in Portuguese, thus catering to the three official language groups of SECAM.” He disclosed that by the time ACI Africa was launched, the Church in Africa had longed for a news platform that could realise SECAM’s vision articulated during the establishment of CEPACS in 1973 which was the formal launch of the communication Apostolate in Africa.
According to Bishop Badejo, that vision, updated at the 1994 Synod of Bishops for Africa in 1994, demanded that the Church in Africa should co-ordinate its media activity, pursue organic pastoral solidarity and project the identity and spirit of the Church as Family of God. He said: “These same sentiments have been upgraded and updated at different occasions to date. The general assembly of CEPACS, held during its 50th anniversary in November 2024 in Lagos, Nigeria, alluded to that fact in its final recommendations highlighting the importance of recognising the noble role of social communication in deepening faith and advancing the spirit of the Synod on Synodality in the continent.” Expressing appreciation and felicitations to ACI Africa on its 5th anniversary, the Bishop said nobody can ignore the impact and growth of ACI in such a short span of time, thanking God for the professional touch in ACI Africa’s online news and the aesthetic outlook of the news platform.
