Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Murcia (Fides Service) - “The Church must reach out to all men and women, call them to the faith and announce to them the Good News of salvation”: this concept was restated on Saturday 12 November in an intervention by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples (CEP), on “The Eucharist and Evangelisation of Peoples”, presented by the Under-Secretary of the CEP Fr. Massimo Cenci at the 1st University Eucharistic Congress held in Spain at the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), 9 - 13 November.
Proposing an interpretation of history the Cardinal said that today the Church’s mission is more urgent than ever in a world where “God is a nuisance, or simply a devout expression, or completely denied and excluded from public life so as to lose all significance” and that “the present profound crisis proposes new connotations and characteristics like those of the early Christian centuries”. We are faced in fact with an apostasy of the faith and radical negation of Revelation, but in this way humanity is impoverished because “it has no other prospects than its own limited reality”. We also see a loss of Christian identity and sense of God. Therefore we are all called in this third millennium to show the “enthusiasm of the early Christians”.
However a passion to evangelise, awareness of its urgency and necessity, only come from direct experience of the living Christ and “the Eucharist is the source, the contents and the power of the Church’s mission to evangelise”. “Through communion with the Body of Christ, the Church achieves ever more deeply her vocation: to be in Christ a sacrament, that is a sign and effective channel of intimate union with God and the entire human race”. Therefore “the Church evangelises when she follows the path and life of Christ” the Cardinal said in his paper and she therefore “imposes nothing, nor does she seek special interests, but wishes only to be at the service of humanity witnessing and proclaiming Jesus Christ, light of the nations”. Lastly the Cardinal recalled that the Eucharist brings us to realise the urgency of evangelisation and that this “the hour of mission ‘ad gentes’ and also first evangelisation in Spain and all over Europe”. After the conference Fr. Massimo Cenci celebrated Mass in the parish of Saint Eulalia, and in the homily recalled that the Eucharist and the mystery of the Incarnation constitute “are an education to mission for the Christian”. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 14/11/2005, righe 30, parole 418)
