Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Service) - “CIAM is at the service of the Church for the spiritual renewal of missionary pastoral workers and to promomte the spirit of mission throughout the Church”: this was how Father Romeo Ballan, MCCJ, Director of the International Centre for Missionary Animation (CIAM) described the task of the Centre which this year marks 30 years of service. CIAM was instituted on 31 May 1974 by the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples in keeping with the directives of Vatican II and with the encouragement and blessing of Pope Paul. “CIAM was born in the context of the Synod on Evangelisation in the Modern World, which bore as a fruit Pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi” Father Ballan told Fides. “Its service is part of the great context of evangelisation next to other institutions (Universities, Colleges, Institutes...) engaged in formation and research for evangelisation ”.
CIAM focuses on the spiritual renewal of missionary workers. “It is undoubtedly important, as Pope John Paul II said in Redemptoris Missio, to renew methods of mission, to study the biblical and theological basis for mission, but it is even more important to renew desire for holiness among those involved in missionary activity. Unless missionaries are renewed there can be no re-launching of missionary service to the world.”
The Centre’s activity is articulated: spiritual exercises, retreats, spirituality weeks, study sessions on missionary themes... “We have missionaries who need to be initiated to missionary work, other who need to re-think their experience, missionaries who are departing, young people or members of lay associations anxious to deepen the missionary dimension of their faith, members of institutions already active in the field of mission and missionary institutes” Father Ballan told Fides and he underlined that CIAM’s aim is to be a point of reference for spiritual renewal for bishops, priests, religious and lay persons.
“One aspect present in all our courses is the Catholicity of the Church - Father Ballan told Fides -, which is favoured by CIAM’s position on the Gianicolo Hill overlooking St Peter’s. We look directly on to the Dome of St Peter’s, the See of Peter, we can hear the Pope when he speaks from his study window. This position and atmosphere helps us and our visitors to rediscover the great value of Catholicity, a value to be lived to the full as Christians, Catholics, and missionaries. This is not tourism, the view in itself on only a view, but it does help reflection to rediscover the sense of belonging to the universal Church”.
In 30 years of activity thousands of people from every continent have come to CIAM to find new impulse and love for the service to the mission and once they come, they always come back. “We have just finished a four week course for women Religious from Vietnam superiors of congregations and formators. This weekend we have a course for members of a lay Movement and in early June there we are holding a ten day course for women Religious celebrating forty years of religious profession. We are planning a missionary spirituality week for priests from Asia, Africa and Oceania studying in Rome before the start of the academic year. From October to December we have a course for priests from Latin America. The docents and animators of all these initiatives are teachers at Urban University and other Pontifical universities in Rome, experts chosen according to the themes proposed or requested by the different groups. “The call to holiness proposed by Pope John Paul II to all Christians as a programme for the third millennium, is another confirmation of the on-going utility of the service which CIAM offers the missionary world. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 31/5/2004; Righe 46; Parole 651)
For more information see: www.ciam.org
