AMERICA/COLOMBIA - National Meeting for priests and religious of indigenous descent: evangelizers in their communities

Bogota (Agenzia Fides) - The Colombian Bishops' Conference has sponsored a national meeting for indigenous priests and religious to be held October 18 to 20 in Bogota. The event will gather priests, religious, and lay people of indigenous descent from across Colombia. The meeting will be held at the headquarters of the Bishops' Conference, and is organized by the Center for Missionary Animation and Ethnic Groups of the Bishops' Conference of Colombia. According to the statement received by Fides, the aim is to provide priests, seminarians, and lay people, indigenous leaders of the country, with the possibility of working as agents to evangelizers among the indigenous and coordinate the work of pastoral communities, starting with indigenous spirituality. It is estimated that the indigenous population of Colombia is approximately 1.3 million people, divided into 32 ethnic communities.
In several Latin American countries, such gatherings are organized based on suggestions from missionary experience, which is seen even in the long-standing papal documents, such as the Apostolic Letter Maximum illud (November 1919), of Benedict XV, which says: “There is one final, and very important, point for anyone who has charge of a mission. He must make it his special concern to secure and train local candidates for the sacred ministry. In this policy lies the greatest hope of the new churches. For the local priest, one with his people by birth, by nature, by his sympathies and his aspirations, is remarkably effective in appealing to their mentality and thus attracting them to the Faith. Far better than anyone else he knows the kind of argument they will listen to, and as a result, he often has easy access to places where a foreign priest would not be tolerated.” (CE) (Agenzia Fides 15/10/2010)