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Thursday October 25, 2007

CEHILA asks its bishops to return to the Gospel as their source

ALC/CLAI, BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, May 18, 2007

Latin American historians, members of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Taxi Heathrow Airport Church in Latin America and the Caribbean (CEHILA in Spanish), called on the Roman Catholic bishops meeting in Aparecida, Brazil, to take hold of the moment as being a “time of grace” and to make constructive use of the opportunity to put themselves in the situation of the poor, the different, and of those who fight against all injustice.

According to CEHILA, “The Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean is seeing a process of deep transformation taking place within its surroundings, because it no longer finds itself before a ‘Catholic religious monopoly’ which up until recent times was what characterized the continent, but instead now faces the show disappearing of militant Catholicism, the rise of a practical atheism and of a complex religious pluralism in our societies.”

The academics underlined Jesus’ preference for the poor and little ones, for those who have been disinherited from their land, and believe that the present time is also an opportunity to “return to drawing from the fountains of the Gospel and their long experience as a church guided by the Spirit, faced with the urgent needs of the present time; to strengthen their pastoral vocation, build the church as the people of God, where the lay people at the level of our base communities and in communion with our bishops, take on a more participative role, itself strengthened by the indispensable participation of women.”

“We hope,” they said, “that you will reaffirm through your actions forms of what Jesus practiced, becoming human and, by his own will, sharing with us and above all with the poorest, to the point of giving us his body as food and the supreme gift of God with us.”

CEHILA hopes that its pastors will accept the urgency of the challenge of the process of the Gospel becoming part of the culture in Latin America, asking that they “accept it in Spirit and in truth through a work humbly upheld by the marvel causing discovery of God’s gift to be found in the original and Afro-American cultures of the continent, in the richness of their religious expressions and their various forms of communicating with the holy.”

CEHILA’s Coordinating Group that signed the document and whose members are Pablo Moreno, Robert Wright, Imelda Vega Centeno and Eduardo Cuadros, ends by expressing the hope that the Aparecida Conference reaffirm the historical memory of the people of God in Latin America and the Caribbean, “in which the poor are subjects of history and acquire a central place as subjects in the church’s pastoral action, in which their dignity and their ethnic and social awareness is respected and defended; a people whose demands the church will attempt to respond to by means of a pastoral ministry centered within the life of their communities.”