“When I go to Mass I see that the people that read are neither heard nor understood,” says Ángel Manuel Perez, about a lack that he has changed into an initiative that, through his Web platform ‘Voz de Misa” [Voice of Mass] remedies this communicative need.
Through courses in parishes, brotherhoods, and all those institutions that require it, Ángel Manuel Pérez, journalist and professional speaker of radio and television, gives the necessary tools to improve the communication of the Word of God in Masses.
As his Website indicates, he teaches “the keys for the transmission of the Word of God, beginning from appropriate vocalization and rhythm so that the sound will reach the hearer as well as possible. To do so, he gives instructions to help “to form your voice so that it has a correct tone and volume, and the Reading is understood in a high and clear way.”
In the beginning, he began to impart these courses by getting in touch with parishes in Madrid and at present reaching more dioceses, such as those of Toledo, Seville, Getafe, Alcalá de Henares, Cuenca, Siguenza-Guadalajara, etc.
In regard to the profiles of the students that come to him, Perez says that they are those people who “habitually read at Mass, those that are older than 40.” Nevertheless, the course is directed to adults, young people, children, seminarians, and priests,” he adds.
He has many anecdotes in his memory but remembers one especially when he was giving one of his workshops, and a gentleman came up to him and said that he was practically illiterate. Then, we got to work on this, I told him that he would also have to work on his own. A few years later, I met him in a church and, to my surprise, I saw that that frightened and insecure man I knew wasn’t the same, he read correctly.
Pérez points out that the course makes a student “conscious that if he makes an effort to read before what he has to read and practices the Reading in a loud voice at home, it can begin to sound as it should and, at the same time, thanks to the Word of God that, when it is understood, it transforms us to the good as believers.”
For this journalist and formator, one of the most important challenges in the Church’s field of communication is, in fact, “that we lectors, through the Word of God, must be able to transmit the Christian message as it should be transmitted. If it’s heard and understood well, it’s something wonderful and exciting.”
Learn more about these workshops and courses through Ángel Manuel Pérez’s Web platform.
Translation by Virginia M. Forrester
