Italy: the "God Today" conference"If God is lacking, if God is ignored, if God is absent, the compass is lacking to show the sum of all the relations we need to find the right road, or the direction to take. We must once again bring into this world of ours the reality of God, make him understood and make him present". This thought of Benedict XVI provides the cue for the international conference on "God Today. With him or without him changes everything" that the Committee of the Cultural Project of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) is promoting in Rome from 10 to 12 December. "We have chosen to speak about God and to do so with the profound conviction that there is no field of human life that is not touched by such a question explain the organizers -. Whether we speak of philosophy, art, science, politics, literature or the way in which each of us leads his poor life, it is God who makes the difference". At the first session of the meeting, "The God of faith and of philosophy" (10 December), the speakers will include Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, Archbishop of Genoa and President of the CEI, and Camillo Ruini, chairman of the Committee for the Cultural Project, as well as historian Andrea Riccardi and philosopher Robert Spaemann. Concurrently a number of complementary seminars will be held: "God in the cinema and in television", "God in literature and in poetry", "God and the spirit", "God in the bookshop", and "God, life and human life". The second session (11 December) will have as its theme: "The God of culture and beauty", with the participation, among others, of the Rector of the Catholic University, Lorenzo Ornaghi, the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice Angelo Scola and Mgr. Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture. "God and religions" is the theme of the third session, again on 11 December, which will comprise a debate between the philosophers Rémi Brague and Massimo Cacciari. Martin Novak, George Coyne and Peter Van Inwagwn, lastly, will dialogue on 12 December on "God and the sciences". The Most Rev. Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, will include the reflection. Info: www.progettoculturale.it/questionedio. Portugal: the role of the permanent deaconOn Tuesday 1st December the bishops’ Commission for Vocations and Ministries (CEVM) held a Pastoral Day in Fatima (Casa do Carmo) on "The ministry of the permanent deacon in the current phase of the Church in Portugal", with the aim of reviewing the situation and starting a reflection in view of the symposium on the diaconate due to be held next year. In his intervention, Father Jorge Madureira, CEVM secretary, explained that "the role of the permanent deacon is not to compensate for the decline in ordinations to the priesthood. The deacon performs his own peculiar function in the Church: that of being the sign of Christ’s face in his person and in his dimension of service". "Unfortunately he added this interpretation of the diaconate is not yet sufficiently widespread; that’s why it’s essential that it be increasingly propagated". "At the present time there are some 150 permanent deacons in Portugal", Father Madureira continued, firmly repudiating the suggestion that there is a tendency for them to take the place of priests: "The scope of the two missions are clearly delimited and differentiated. There are dioceses in which a shortage of priests can be noted, but which are still involved in a process of reflection on the permanent diaconate. In Portugal, the quantitative insufficiency of priests and the development and presence of the permanent diaconate cannot in any way be placed in any direct relation or in any relation of cause and effect".Spain: portrait of the missionary "The missionary is a person who has left everything for Christ, and not for an idealized or remote Christ, but for a Christ whom God sent to meet him, a Christ who has exerted his appeal over him, vanquished him and convinced him as he did Paul, Peter, John…", wrote Archbishop Francisco Pérez of Pamplona and national director of the Pontifical Mission-Aid Societies on 3rd December, in a pastoral letter to mark the feast of St. Francis Xavier, patron of missions. "Francis Xavier was born and bred the archbishop recalled within a family and a group that was filled with the presence of God. The missionary is not someone who decides to be a witness of Christ in a moment of personal euphoria", but "is born within a community" guided "by the Holy Spirit". According to the archbishop "when there’s a living community, vocations to the priesthood, to the religious life and to the missionary life naturally spring forth. That small group of young men, tempered by Ignatius or rather by the spirit of Jesus who shone forth in Ignatius, was able to renew the Church in so many places and to complete important missions as in the case of Francis Xavier". That explains the need to reinforce in our parishes "these groups inspired by the presence of the Spirit of Christ" from which the "genuine vocations" of new missions will be born.
