VATICAN - Cardinal Filoni: the reform of the Church to transform it into a missionary sense

Wednesday, 14 March 2018 pontifical urbaniana university   pope francis   filoni  

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - "Let us not forget that it is the Holy Spirit, dominum et vivificantem, the agent that incessantly moves the Church to a permanent purification and reformation of itself, so that it goes ahead without being conditioned by the burdens of historical-cultural structures, which have now become sterile, and quickly directs its steps on today's most bitter and arduous paths of the human family". This is what Card. Fernando Filoni, Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Urbaniana University and Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples said during the opening of the international Conference "Reforms in the Church, reforms of the Church", which takes place at the Missionary university until March 15th.
The Cardinal recalled "the multicultural specificity of Urbaniana": "Its protagonists, Students and Professors, are themselves bearers of the multiple ferments of the urgent renewal and missionary transformation of the Church aroused by the Holy Spirit. Here I see, almost summarized, the scenario of the Churches of the peoples, nations and continents that, as Prefect of the missionary Congregation, I visit and learn to know especially in their commitment to root the Gospel in their cultures".
Especially in the context of the epochal change we are experiencing, dominated by the imperative of economic progress to be achieved at all costs, "the inculturation of the Gospel takes on a rich meaning of spiritual humanization of different cultures and of integral development of peoples".
The Church of Christ lives its universal messianicity, the Cardinal continued, "in its tension to remain constantly faithful to Christ's mandate to "go everywhere" and "make disciples all peoples" listening to the Spirit and in dialogue with anyone.
The Ecclesia semper reformanda is so much demanded by the unpredictable potentiality of the Word of God as by the ecclesial fidelity to it".
Therefore, Cardinal Filoni underlined that the Conference follows the determination of Pope Francis to give concreteness to the "reform of the Church that goes forth as a missionary", the first condition "to direct a new stage of evangelization throughout the Church". "It does not conceive - he explained – the "reforms in the Church" and the "reform of the Church" as opportunistic renunciation of historical elements of the Church's tradition and not even to allow the entry in it of the changing and conflicting winds of relativism, of secularism, reductionism, irenism, etc., these are the so many trends in the combination of the 'real world' and the 'world of the Web'. Viceversa , It conceives it as an effective "missionary transformation of the Church". This, therefore, is the 'reform of the Church' that generates the 'reforms in the Church'." (SL) (Agenzia Fides, 14/3/2018)


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