the Catholic Church united around evangelization

Looking back over these ten years, what are the main convictions that guide this Mission Congress?

There are three:

– The first is that we must give ourselves the keys to getting started or moving forward in evangelization. How to evangelize in a spirit and manner faithful to the Catholic Church? I’ll give you an example: do you have to be strongly affirmative, radical, to be a missionary? However, we talk about “missionary delicacy”: what is it? Round tables will allow participants to take this necessary step back from what they think and experience about evangelization.

– The second is that we need to connect together to God to derive the momentum of mission. There will be times of prayer to experience together this encouragement, this enthusiasm that God gives.

– The third is that we must create relationships: relationships between distant territories, between groups of distant spiritual sensitivities. We are also experiencing the “archipelization” of society in the Church as well as a toughening of the word on those who do not think like us. This saddens me because the Church should be this place where different convictions come together. I’ll tell you about our project for young people. We wanted to bring young people together on Saturday evening in Bercy; the other participants will join various proposals in several places in Paris. At the beginning, we said to ourselves: “What if we walked together from Notre-Dame to Bercy?” But we felt that we also needed to honor the differences between these young Catholics.

We then imagined a preliminary step: four steps towards Notre-Dame from four churches. A march will bring together the scout movements; another will be led by Anuncio, the Chemin neuf and the Emmanuel Community; a third will bring together all the groups born in the Parisian suburbs; the fourth will be accompanied by Our Lady of Christianity and the Missionaries of Divine Mercy. Everyone will spend a time of prayer on the square in front of Notre-Dame before leaving together, mixed, for Bercy.