The staff of WYD Madrid has rallied interest and is helping prepare all those young people with a major presence on the Internet, especially through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Photos of the preparation phase are posted on Flickr and videos produced by or about WYD 2011 are collected on a special YouTube channel.
Organizers announced May 10 that the Madrid event will be the first World Youth Day with its own radio station and web-TV site.
Erika Rivera Palma, a spokeswoman for WYD ’11, said the organization looked for 20,000 volunteers to help during the event. More than 30,000 people have applied and the staff is still sifting through the applications to settle on 22,400 volunteers.
As of May 12, she said, the World Youth Day staff was 500 strong and 80 per cent of those workers were volunteers. Some were already in Madrid, but many were working from home on the web site and Facebook pages.
That WYD Madrid has a strong presence in cyberspace — a very interactive universe where comments are posted with ease — may have something to do with the amount of criticism that has surrounded the official hymn for the Madrid gathering.
The anthem, with words by Auxiliary Bishop Cesar Franco of Madrid, was released in November. But when WYD organizers started feeling the burn of the online commentators, they opened a worldwide contest, soliciting songs — not to replace the bishop’s hymn, but to play alongside it. Some 270 songs were submitted and just more than 130 were deemed eligible, said Rivera. The public was being asked to go to www.madridmeencanta.org to vote for their favourites by May 31. A WYD panel was to take the top 25 vote-getters and choose five of them to feature in Madrid.
Hundreds of bands, choirs and soloists applied for an official performance slot at World Youth Day, vying for an international stage, but no pay. Organizers chose 255 of them.
The first three afternoons, evenings and nights — “evening” in Madrid would be considered “night” in many other parts of the world — have been set aside for cultural activities, including the music and museum visits. The mornings will be dedicated to religious education sessions, which take place in hundreds of locations and in dozens of languages. The teachers of the sessions are 250 bishops, who almost always leave plenty of time for dialogue with the youths.
Jacquinet said the pontifical council chooses the 250 bishops, usually based on those who have told the council they will attend WYD and are available.
The final choice, he said, is based on language and country of origin. The council, he said, also takes into account that some bishops “have a special charisma” in addition to their teaching charism.
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