VATICAN - Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe opens international convention on the Council decree Ad gentes forty years on : “An act of homage to our heroic missionaries who spend their lives often in difficult and dangerous conditions so Christ may be announced and all men and women may receive salvation”

Vatican City (Fides Service) - An international Convention on the 40th anniversary of the Ad gentes Council decree being held at the Pontifical Urban University was opened this morning by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples. The convention is promoted by the Congregation. In the opening address the Cardinal said: “For various reasons we had to delay this Convention long awaited by missiology scholars, missionary orders and institutes and Church movements involved in missionary activity, but above all our missionaries who announce the Gospel all over the world and continually ask for help to carry on with enthusiasm their vocation to be witness of Christ ‘ad gentes’. Our Convention wishes also to be an act of homage to our heroic missionaries who spend their lives often in difficult and dangerous conditions so Christ may be announced and all men and women may receive salvation”.
After thanking the Lord “for inspiring the Council Fathers to reflect on the significance of mission which is fundamental in the life of the Church”, Cardinal Sepe remarked on some “originalities” in the document “Ad Gentes”: missionary opening of particular Churches and lay responsibility for missionary activity; precise guidelines for the organisation of missionary activity, the duties of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples and the Bishops’ Conferences. The decree identified the profound “sources” of the Church's mission and her missionary activity, illustrating them in the light of the Trinitarian life: “In the Trinity, the charity of the Father is the inexhaustible “source of love”, from which is born the new and definitive mission of the Son, achieved through the working of the Holy Spirit”.
Cardinal Sepe recalled two specific ecclesiological ambits highlighted in the Decree: bishops and laity. “The missionary duty falls first of all to the Bishops as leaders of the ecclesial communities and members of the college of bishops… lay missionary activity, particularly from the Council onwards, is one of the most surprising novelties and the most consoling riches of ad gentes missionary activity.”
The Ad Gentes decree was the first of a series of marvellous documents from the Popes and the bishops. “Today as we commemorate this Council Decree forty years on - Cardinal Sepe concluded-, we wish to follow in the theological, spiritual and pastoral wake of this “missionary teaching’ and continue with new enthusiasm and passion on the path Christ indicated to us, the mission of the Church which is ‘by nature missionary’.” (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 9/3/2006; righe 33, parole 428)