AMERICA/BRAZIL - Religious life in the Pan-Amazon region: “being present there where life is most in danger”

Friday, 27 April 2018

foto Luis Miguel Modino

Tabatinga (Agenzia Fides) - "This meeting has been a gift of God’s grace " Fides was told by Bishop Adolfo Zon, Alto Solimões (Brazil), in whose diocese of Tabatinga, from 20 to 24 April there was a meeting of Religious Congregations and projects with a Pan-Amazon view, with about 90 participants representing 30 different religious communities (see Fides 24/4/2018).
A main point of the meeting, found also in the final message, was inter-congregational and inter-institutional work, presently being considered in various parts of the Amazon region. In this sense Bishop Zon, whose diocese borders with Brazil, Colombia and Peru underlined the importance of joint organization in this triple border and how the three ecclesiastic circumscriptions (diocese of Alto Solimões, Brazil, together with the apostolic vicariates of Leticia, Colombia and San José del Amazonas, Peru), "are working on the project of evangelisation ".
For all those present, the meeting created great hopes for building a Church with an Amazon and Indigenous face in view of the Pan-Amazon Synod in the region. As the final message underlines new paths for the ‘Church and Integral Ecology’, the theme of the Synod, "will be discovered there where there is a process of listening".
The religious present expressed the necessity "enter a dynamic constant of profound conversion", so that the Amazon region and its people may capture the hearts of missionaries. At the same time the Final Message, insists on the necessity to "cross all borders geographical, symbolic, cultural, personal and congregational". All this in view of becoming "a Church that is open and missionary, and leads us to be present there where the Church is most in danger, in the peripheries".
Pan-Amazon Religious life expresses elements capable of inventing new models of evangelisation, better suited to the present times and the present ecclesial and local realities. All this in view of the Synod process in which local and universal reflection can exert a profound transformation of Church life in the region, just as the mission of Religious Consecrated Life played for centuries a decisive role among the peoples of the Amazon region, whom it is essential to listen to and accompany. (LMM) (Agenzia Fides 27/04/2018)

foto Luis Miguel Modino

foto Luis Miguel Modino

foto Luis Miguel Modino

foto Luis Miguel Modino

foto Luis Miguel Modino


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