A new way of being a brother!

The Marist renewal session is taking place at our General House in Rome from March 15 to May 8, 2015. This eight-week lifelong learning is aimed at religious Brothers aged 65-80. It involves 22 Brothers: Eight from Quebec, seven French, five Belgian, one Greek and one Malagasy.

Two priests from Quebec, of Rome’s Canadian College, are accompanying the group as chaplains: Steve Lemay (parish priest of Lac Mégantic) and Pierre Bougie, (Professor of the Major Seminary of Montreal). Here is the summary of the main objective of the session.

Under the theme “a new way of being a brother,” the meeting is a time of “tuning” for senior brothers who, voluntarily, leave behind their little train of life to respond to the invitation of the last general chapter of 2009: “With Mary, go in haste to a new land”. Therefore, the meeting offers the opportunity to see how everyone lives this call, personally and as a community.

To do this, the program follows the approach suggested by the General Council, which is to encourage participants to a form of conversion to the novelty required by the current time in the context of globalization.

People, who are professionals in their own field, have been invited to give assistance to each one to help them walk at a good pace towards this new horizon that affects all aspects of our commitments to follow Christ.

The topics are:

1 Live brotherhood as prophets and mystics
2 Celibacy and sexuality, affectivity and chastity of monks and priests
3 Marist and Marian spirituality of Marist brothers
4 Prayer and interiority
5 A church is dying and another wants to be born: a horizontal Marian church
6 Desert times in the city and in places of pilgrimage (our established places- Lourdes and Assisi)
7 On the way to 200 years of the birth of the Institute of the Marist Brothers in 2017

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Br. Bernard Beaudin (Province of Canada) – Animator
Br. Maurice Goutagny, fms (Province of the Hermitage) – Animator's deputy