Stanislaw Rylko, Department President of the department together with the secretary, Bishop Josef Clemens, presented the Third World Meeting in a press conference in the Vatican. The statement on the expectations on the part of Ecclesial Movements and New Communities will be relayed by Maria Voce, President of the Focolare Movement and Jean-Luc Moens, International PR Director of Emmanuel Community
This will be the third step towards “growth toward ecclesiastical maturity.” The first meeting was held in 1998 and again in 2006, in conjunction with the two big meetings of the Movements with John Paul I – who defined the phenomenon of the movements as “a stream of grace,” affirming that from these movements the Church expects “mature fruits of communion and commitment” – and with Benedict XVI, who regarded this itinerary a “healthy provocation for the Church, a creative minority that is decisive for the future of humanity.”
Pope Francis met the Movements and New Communities on 18 May 2013, and now the 3rd World Meeting will draw inspiration from his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, in which he calls the movements the “true protagonists of a new step of the Church’s evangelical mission as a manifestation of joy, reaching out towards the geographic and existential peripheries of our world, side by side with all the poor, abandoned and isolated people – the bitter product of the culture of marginalisation prevalent today.”
Before the journalists, Cardinal Stanisłau Ryłko expressed what many are wondering about today. How come, “in a world that radically rejects God, there are still so many men and women, youth and adults who discover the joy of being Christians” and “choose Christ and his Gospel as the unwavering compass of their existence?” The variety and richness of the new charisms “offer pedagogical paths” of Christian life that are so “amazingly effective, as to be able to change the life of people and arouse an extraordinary evangelical fervour.” And with “their missionary creativity, they are capable of finding new ways of testifying to and announcing the Gospel.”
Bishop Josef Clemens, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, commented on the theme of the three-day meeting: context and various aspects of evangelisation, purification from obstacles and impediments, dynamism and collaboration between charisms, role of the women and the implementation of the inclusion process of the poor.
Maria Voce, President of the Focolare Movement, stressed how much the Second Vatican Council today is for the laity, an “incentive and mirror” of their own vocation and responsibility towards the Church and contemporary society.” In expressing the expectations of the laity, she hoped that the Congress would “mark a forward step towards maturity,” that “reflections and confrontation, communion of success and failures, experiences and project set the conditions for God, Lord of history, and may draw not only fruits of communion and mutual enrichment,” but orient all to “look to and live always with renewed joy, for the only great objective of Christ’s Church: Father, that all may be one… since this is “God’s dream.” We hope to be able to respond to the deepest expectations of men and women today and contribute to making humanity one great family.”
“We want to progress along the path of pastoral conversion” the Pope is asking of us, and above all to “make an experience of communion,” remarked Jean-Luc Moens of Emmanuel Community who underlined that “we are eager to discover how the Holy Spirit works in the others. The meeting will be a unique occasion for mutual discovery.”
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