his
was my third experience as a delegate to a General Chapter.
Chapters are to religious communities what Legislatures are to states.
A Chapter is our governing assembly where we elect new leadership,
evaluate our work and project new directions for the future.
For the first time we gathered as a Chapter outside of Italy.
We met in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico.
The 43 delegates represented all 19 of our provincial regions. The diversity of the group reflected the international character of our worldwide community, coming as we did from Spain and Italy, Scotland and the USA, the Congo, Brazil and Mexico.
The Mission of the Xaverians at the Beginning of the Third Millennium
At your word (Luke 5:5)
After over one hundred years from the beginning of our missionary family (1895) and in line with the Conciliar renewal of our own Constitutions (1983), with ‘audacity’, we take up once again the missionary project of Blessed Guido Maria
Conforti, which is the root of our congregation and of our vocation, with the intention of strengthening and giving it more purpose Believing in the Gospel, we take upon ourselves the mandate of Jesus to be witnesses and announcers of the Good News to all peoples
This is a time of great radical transformation… While we feel particularly exposed to today’s crises and often incapable of being up to par with these phenomena, we have the certainty of the power of the Gospel and the presence of Christ We Xaverians place ourselves in the Church as its ‘missionary memory…’ With the joy of the Lord, we accept the gift to have been chosen to be sent in mission ‘ad gentes’, ‘ad extra’, and ‘ad vitam’
Missionaries Ad Gentes: it is the sole and exclusive obligation of the Xaverian to the evangelization of peoples, human groups and socio-cultural contexts, in which Christ and his Gospel is not known, or in which the Christian community is not mature enough to incarnate the faith in their milieu and announce the Gospel to others.
Missionaries Ad Extra: this refers to a geographical leaving from one’s very country of origin for the missionary cause. This leaving is also an exodus that is spiritual, cultural, and affective which makes us capable of acculturating ourselves to new places and to find no securities other than the Gospel which we announce.
Missionaries Ad Vitam: the Xaverian is available and dedicated to the service of the mission and to the missionary vocation totally and for life, to the exclusion of everything else, no matter how noble and holy.
Consecrated to Mission: the vow of Mission is, for the Xaverian, the first vow and the embrace of the religious life is consecration to God of all our life for the announcement of his Kingdom. Consecration and Mission for us are one.
Many are the changes in our world and Church. We looked at our strengths and our limits. There were three great moments to the Chapter.
First we prayed. We spend time together with the Lord and each other to just listen to the Spirit. Then we listened to the many reports from the countries we represent which brought out joys, concerns, areas of growth, and hopes. This material became the backdrop to our main task completing a six-year consultation of the whole Xaverian community which would lead to the writing and publication of a Xaverian Guide to Mission.
Mission means and is many things to our Church.
Everyone is called to Mission. But the Xaverian particular gift to the Mission Outreach of our Church and how we do that was refined at this Chapter. It was also framed by the reality of the lives and futures of the peoples we serve in some very difficult assignments, Central Africa, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, and Columbia to mention the most at risk.
Our Founder, Blessed Guido Maria Conforti, wanted us to be consecrated to Mission as a community. We mission together as team communities. Each person gift and call is a contribution to the whole. The lands more in need of mission service are Asia and Africa. They continue to be our priority. In places such as the USA and Europe, we engage the local church toward a clearer understanding and commitment to Mission, stirring in it missionary vocations and educating it to issues of mission by means of our global experiences.
We looked at practical ways to develop the underlying mission spirituality so as to make it appealing and contagious.
The
2001 Chapter was very realistic, and it was not able to respond to the many
requests by bishops around the world to open new mission fields.
We chose to strengthen our present missions and redistribute personnel
according to needs, to care better for confreres who are old and ill; to
energize our training programs both in northern as well as in southern
countries. We did elect new
leaders. Both Fr. Rino and Fr.
Luigi, our new General and Vice-General, are classmates of mine, ordained in
1977. The torch of leadership has
been passed to my generation,… a sobering thought!
One of the elected councilors is Fr. Jose’ Guadalupe “Lupo”
Sanchez, a graduate of our Chicago Theology Community, who for the past 10 years
has been serving in Indonesia.
So, another Chapter has ended and passed the challenge of our conversations, deliberations and prayer on to the whole membership. We look forward to the Lord’s blessings and challenge as the next six years play out. At the Chapter we often heard repeated what our Founder once said, “The Lord could not have been more generous to us.”
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)