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Praying, talking, thinking, discussing, and seeking the will of God.” His point was that a missionary church-one that constantly goes out, alert to new situations and contexts, ready to abandon old ways and to take on new ones when needed-is by definition one that allows for the participation of the whole body, as in the Acts of the Apostles.
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In January 2021-Covid-19 had put the assembly preparations back a year-Francis sent a video message making clear this was to be a very different beast from a general conference of bishops: “It is something else: a gathering of the people of God, of laywomen and men, of men and women religious, priests and bishops-the people of God walking together.
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It was no longer about how to ensure the bishops took up Aparecida’s invitation, but instead, how to create space for the people of God to assume their calling as “missionary disciples.” The point, in other words, was not to sit around debating Aparecida, like academics, but to enable the very thing whose absence was the obstacle to its implementation: the agency of the people of God. In the face of this immobility, according to Jorge Lozano, archbishop of San Juan in Argentina and Celam’s secretary general, the question had moved over time. Yet many dioceses had remained stuck in old ways of clericalism and moralism. True, the church in the great metropolitan belts of greater Buenos Aires, or in Texcoco and Tlanepantla on the outskirts of Mexico City, was profoundly reshaped by Aparecida’s call for a pastoral and missionary conversion. The pope was adamant that the task was still to implement Aparecida, which many bishops had “put back on the shelf,” as Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, of Managua, Nicaragua, told the assembly. At the end of 2019, Celam’s new president, Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos, of Trujillo, Peru, who had overseen a restructuring of the Bogotá-based council after a long period of crisis in its finances and governance, put to him the idea of a sixth general conference of bishops. It was Pope Francis, too, who suggested that this was the moment for the continent to take stock and revive that vision-only this time in a synodal way, with the people of God as the protagonist. Peter’s first Latin-American successor, whose pontificate has been inspired by the remarkable discernment and insight that took place at that Brazilian shrine. The time is now 15 years on from the groundbreaking Celam conference at Aparecida, Brazil, in May 2007, and eight years into the reform by St. Third, to gather in around 50 small groups-a few of us in Casa Lago, linking up with the majority Zooming in-to hear how the spirit could be calling the church in Latin America at this time.
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Second, to hear from church leaders, theologians and prophetic witnesses across Latin America, who gave talks and testimonies live or in videos that were streamed throughout the week on YouTube. The task? First, to attune our ear to the cry of the people, whose voices were captured in “a narrative synthesis,” a summary of a four-month listening exercise earlier in the year, to which some 70,000 people contributed, either as individuals or on behalf of their communities. It was no small irony that the Latin American church’s first continent-wide “ecclesial assembly” took place inside a silent, walled compound, far from any madding crowd. An unlikely Briton among the dozens of bishops, religious, clergy and lay people from more than 20 nations across Latin America, I had accepted Celam’s kind invitation to be an asambleísta presencial (an in-person assembly member) there. The Asamblea Eclesial had been the pope’s suggestion, as was the location in Mexico, so that it could be under the “maternal protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron of Las Américas.” The assembly began and ended with Mass at her basilica in Mexico City, but the gathering was in Casa Lago, named for the nearby Lake of Guadalupe, which belongs to the Mexican bishops’ conference.
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North of Mexico City in Cuautitlán Izcalli ( n Náhuatl, “your house among the trees.”), for a week at the end of November, in the era of Covid-19 and Zoom, over 1,000 people-120 in-person assembly members, joined online by another 900 delegates-came together at the behest of Celam, the Council of Latin American Bishops’ Conferences, to discuss and discern.