Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Quito (Fides Service) – “You represent our Particular Churches and you are new heralds of the life of our Church in Ecuador” Father Timoteo Lehane SVD, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) in Ecuador, told national delegates to the imminent 2nd American Mission Congress attending a National Pre-CAM four day meeting in Quito 28 to 31 October. Father Timoteo informs Fides about the work of missionary animation organised jointly by the Pontifical Mission Societies and the Department for missions of the Ecuadorian Conference of Bishops in preparation for the great missionary event CAM 2 in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
“We distributed 100 copies of the CAM 2 work plan and 2000 CAM2 posters in all 23 dioceses through diocesan PMS directors and diocesan mission teams”. Moreover a number of missionary radio programmes were broadcast nation-wide. A weekly 60 minute programme Your life is mission was broadcast by Ecuador’s Radio Cattolica. Throughout the country dioceses celebrated a Year of Youth Mission with the theme Young people your life is mission!
Ten diocesan Pre-CAM diocesan meetings were organised by diocesan PMS directors. Conclusions emerging from these ten events were presented to the National Pre-CAM attended by 60 delegates from all over the country.
The objective of the National Pre-CAM meeting, Father Timoteo explained was“to help the Ecuador delegation to CAM 2 prepare adequately. And in fact during the meeting participants studied the CAM 2Work Plan and then formed workshop groups to finalise the contribution of the Church in Ecuador”.
The national delegation, composed of 86 delegates, will be led by Cardinal Antonio Gonzalez Zumarraga, emeritus Archbishop of Quito with Bishop Pedro Gabrielli, President of the Bishops’ Missions Commission. The 86 delegates are priests, religious men and women, lay people including a missionary family mother, father, and their two children, and six Missionary Childhood children.
Father Timoteo tells Fides that there are signs that mission awareness is growing and becoming a new reality in Ecuador which already has about 250 missionaries ad gentes working in different countries all over the world. Four are as far away as Papua New Guinea, two are in South Korea and the others in different countries of Africa, Europe and America Latina. “We have growing numbers of young people and members of religious communities who ask to go on mission ad gentes” Father Timoteo concluded. The National Pre-CAM closed with a solemn Mass presided by the Nuncio, Archbishop Paul Lebeaupin and the sending of yet another missionary, Comboni Father Felix Cabascango who will start his mission in Chad. (R.Z.) (Fides Service 7/11/2003 – lines 40; words 454).
