The Catholic Church to search for the distanced

ALC/CLAI, SAO PAULO, Brasil, June 5, 2007

The Catholic Church is to widen and emphasize home visitations as one way of meeting Taxi Heathrow Airport with Catholics who are distanced from the church. The proposal is endorsed by the final document issued by the V General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, which ended Thursday, May 31, in Aparecida del Norte, San Pablo.

The Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, in a general news conference held before the Conference’s closure, said that the Catholic Church does not want to enter into conflict with any group as a result of this initiative.

“Religious liberty is fundamental for us, but we have the right to reach out to all,” the bishop clarified, according to the press advisory of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB in Spanish).

The bishops gathered at the Conference undertake the desire, in accordance with the document, to begin a new stage in the church’s pastoral care, with a “strong apostolic ardor and a greater missionary commitment.” They are preparing to “renew the church communities and the parish structures” for the task of transmitting the faith.

Matters such as a preferential option for the poor, base church communities, the Amazon, are considered in the document, which also points out the faces of the poor of the continent: the unemployed, the migrants, those who have been abandoned, and those who are ill.

“The privileged recipients of the church’s mission are the poor. We must go to them first,” explained the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy. For him, “to go to the poor, giving them support, accompanying them, is to be political in its broadest sense. Evangelization cannot be separated from human development.”

Hummes emphasized that the Catholic Church wants to contribute with all the forces of society so that hunger, illiteracy and other shortages be eliminated.

For Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the result of the final document was “stupendous.” He commented that the theme running throughout the document is the Gospel message, “so that in Him all may have life.”

At the general news conference, the Honduran cardinal stated that: “We want to reaffirm our option for the poor in practice and not only in theory. And there are paths for doing that.”

Some 267 persons took part in the V Conference, including cardinals, bishops, invited guests, experts and observers.