Italy: “Thou hast prepared their grain””May the Word of the Lord accompany us in this annual reflection and guide the discernment that as the community of the Church we are called to make to identity ways and means so that the earth may return to being the place where man can experience his relation with God”: so opens the Message for the Day of Thanksgiving that will be celebrated on 8 November. The Message was published in recent days by the Commission for Social Problems and Work for Justice and Peace of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, under the title “Thou providest their grain, for so thou hast prepared it” (Ps 65:9). The document (www.chiesacattolica.it) stresses the importance of the “conservation of the territory” and protecting agricultural zones, especially the poorest ones and those most isolated in mountainous or hilly areas. It points out that “so-called ‘neo-rurals’ are becoming ever more common today: i.e. people who have abandoned the urban environment to go and live in the countryside, though continuing to work in the city”. The message further emphasizes that agricultural work enables man to “establish a direct and continuous relation with the earth” according to “God’s original plan”, and points out the role played by individuals in maintaining the integrity of the environment. It also speaks of the emerging countries where “chronic effects of injustice and social imbalance” are being registered, and appeals for international justice and solidarity.France: a seminar on “guilt””Reinventing guilt” is the theme of the international seminar due to be held at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris on 12 September. The meeting is being promoted by the Antoine Guggenheim Fathers, of the same College, Jacques Arènes (Centre Sèvres) and Philippe Bordeyne (Theologicum). “The contemporary world is dismissing the subjective importance of guilt and instead attaches greater value to collective acts of repentance, which are spectacular but devoid of the personal dimension”, explain the organizers in a press release. “Many adolescents and adults” are thus “excluded from guilt and have great difficulty in perceiving responsibility for their own actions”. “We have emerged from a cultural system in which guilt was one of the fundamental factors of the relationship with others in private, professional and social life, and entered a culture of exculpation in which paradoxically other forms of guilt arise with which postmodern man has to come to terms and to which he must adjust his own continually disappointed hopes”. The aim of the seminar, says the statement, is to make “a diagnosis of this process of exculpation”. Sociologists, historians, philosophers, psychoanalysts and theologians “will try to identify whether new paths of wisdom are possible or have already been born”. The speakers include Natalie Depraz (Université de Paris IV), Guillaume Cuchet (Université Lille III), and Jean-Pierre Lebrun, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Founded in the thirteenth century, the Collège des Bernardins was restored by the archdiocese of Paris thanks to the initiative of Cardinal Lustiger as “a place of research and debate for the Church and for society”.Portugal: why the decline in vocations?In coincidence with Benedict XVI’s proclamation of the Year for Priests, the 6th Symposium of the Portuguese Clergy was recently held at the Sanctuary of Fatima. It was attended by over 750 priests from all the dioceses of the country. The meeting, which ended on 4 September, was focused on the theme: “Reviving the gift within you”, and was aimed at discussing the continuous and permanent formation of priests. In his opening address, Mgr. António Francisco, chairman of the episcopal Commission for Vocations and Ministries (CEVM), expressed the hope that “the Symposium would be able to discover and express, in a considered and accurate way, all the essential points which may bring new impetus for the future and in which the Church needs powerfully to invest”. He especially emphasized that “the work of the clergy is not bureaucratic, administrative or statistical; it is rather a service willed by God”. Father Jorge Madureira, secretary of the CEVM, declared that “in response to the cultural transformation of the contemporary world, the permanent formation of the priest is a duty he must assume; he owes it both to himself and to the task he is called to perform”. With reference to the growth of vocations registered at the world level, he then added that “European Christian communities must analyse the reasons for their own vocational decline in contrast to other countries subject to the same influences of globalization”, and he proposed his own solution by saying that “in the context of a distracted and superficial society, the choice of the life of the priest is now a option of rupture that finds its profound roots in the Mystery of God and in his free will”.
