Madrid, Spain. Each year, the Spanish Church draws on the Claretian Missionaries for the National Weeks of Religious Life. For this reason, ever since 1971, hundreds of religious come together to delve deeply into a topic.
In the past few years the Theological Institute of Religious Life proposed another kind of encounter that is also taking root: the celebration of more brief symposiums on specific topics of today.
These encounters started In 2008 with the issue of authority and obedience, refreshed by the appearance of a Vatican instruction. Later they reflected on the Year of the Priest or the figure of lay religious. This year 2012 the theme of “the new evangelization” was chosen.
The many attendees were able to listen directly to several participants in the Synod, such as Cardinal Luis Martinez Sistach, Archbishop of Barcelona; D. Ricardo Blázquez, Vice President of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, and the Bro. Alvaro Rodríguez Echeverría, Superior General of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, as well as several journalists who covered the synodal assembly. At the beginning of one of the sessions there is an interview of about a quarter of an hour with Fr. Josep Maria Abella, CMF, who also gave account of the event.
At the center of the interventions were various Claretian professors of the Institute: Bonifacio Fernández, José Cristo Rey García Paredes, Luis Alberto Gonzalo Díez, and Pedro Belderrain.
“Claretian Publications” will gather together the presentations to make them available to more readers of Spanish language.
D. Ricardo Blázquez, Archbishop of Valladolid and synodal father, surprised those present using a series of texts of St. Anthony Mary Claret to insist on the relevance of apostolic zeal as a fundamental attitude in this new phase of the Mission of the Church.
