Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
L'Avana (Agenzia Fides) - In Havana the 31st ordinary assembly of the Council of Latin American Bishops's Conferences CELAM closed with Mass in the cathedral presided by the Archbishop of Havana in Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino. In his homily the Cardinal said the Church's model is the Blessed Virgin Mary “who set out on a journey carrying Christ ”.
Referring the 5th General Conference of the Council of Bishops' Conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean held in Aparecida in May, the Cardinal said that gathering of the Church was "effective and affective as an experience of the collegiality among bishops; it was also theologically exact because the Church finds herself when she returns to her origins and foundations, when she accepts the mandate to evangelise and sets out again, looking for the signs of the times in order to start again from Jesus Christ who sends us and whom we must announce". This was also the decision reached by the Bishops in a Aparecida, the Cardinal said.
The Cardinal recalled that the cross is always part of the life of the evangeliser because 'mission and humiliation go hand in hand' and he continued "On this lap of evangelisation, the fruit of the Aparecida Conference, which the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean is now beginning, bishops, priests, consecrated persons, laity must all feel involved as disciples of Christ, we must accept this risk and leave behind false securities to go on mission".
Continuing his homily the Cardinal said rather than an open attack on the Church as such, there is, “an attempt to perforate the Christian culture" relativism and subjectivism. “They claim to substitute a conception of the world and man based on natural law with a strange code of rights which includes paradoxically the manipulation of human life for supposedly scientific ends, the elimination of the unborn child, according ‘freedom to chose' and following this logic can even decide on the life of the "handicapped, elderly, the terminally ill etc. The family, nucleus and source of society, is threatened in its very essence when marriage is no longer a union between a man and a woman, and we could continue with an unending list of such acts of folly".
In this situation the Catholic Church must be a voice crying in the desert, “she has the compelling duty to continue to awaken the conscience of the men and women of today" and must "proclaim the primacy of God, as presented to us by Jesus Christ ”. But this mission, the Cardinal stressed, "rather than a matter of imposing, it is a question of inviting rather than forcing, asking men and women of our peoples to be disciples of Jesus Christ".
Concluding his homily the Cardinal invoked the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe. "May she assist and sustain the new presidency of CELAM to prepare and co-ordinate the Great Continental Mission which will start the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean on this new lap of evangelisation". (RG) (Agenzia Fides 16/7/2007 righe 27 parole 279)
