2017-04-05 SPAIN

300 youths celebrate bicentenary

Salamanca was the city chosen by the Youth and Vocation Ministry Team of the Compostela province to celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the Marist Institute with the youth.

The encounter, under the theme ‘200 and more,’ gathered 300 youth from Castilla and Leon, Galicia, Asutrias and Portugal who belong to the province’s youth movement MarCha, on April 1 and 2.
 
During these days, they reflected on the work done these past three years in preparation for the bicentenary celebration, based on the circulars of the superior general on the occasion of Montagne, Fourviere and La Valla year, and the invitation to live a universal fraternity based on each one’s interior experience which enables us to form part of the Marist mission.
 
Participants included general councillor Brother Ernesto Sánchez, who took part in the panel of testimonies of Marist life together with Brothers Today Secretariat director Brother Tony Leon, who also animated an art workshop, and three laity with different life paths in the Marist world: Jorge Isidro, coordinator of the Youth and Vocation Ministry Team of the Iberica Province, Andreia Silva, educator of the Lar Marista de Ermesinde and María Bobillo, coordinator of the local animation team of the Ourense school and candidate of the formation programme of Lavalla200> International Communities for a New Beginning. 
They all shared with the rest of the participants their experience and vision of the Marist world, based on who they are and what moves them in this moment of their lives in the mission or in the service they are currently carrying out.
 
The event, of a celebrative character, helped the youths reflect on the future of the Marist mission in the area of youth and vocation ministry, opened to the call of universal fraternity in the Institute. It has also been a formative opportunity to discuss different areas linked to the education of children and youth in their free time, such as the care of their interiority, creative writing, art, dance, photography or theatre.
 
 
One of the moments in which the youths were most energetic was on Saturday night during the concert of the BandAlegre group, which interpreted the Institute’s history and the youth movement MarCha itself, through original songs and versions adapted for the occasion. BandAlegre is a group of young Marists who emerge from a dream and a project of two young brothers, Rui and Fabio, to whom he joins the passion to live and transmit God through music.
 
On Sunday morning, participants imagined and reinvented the L’Hermitage house, adapting it to the world’s new realities for another 200 years. After the break, there was a Mass, in which participants, in the light of the Gospel, were invited to be salt and light, to be the relay of so many generations of brothers and lay people who since 1817 continue to realize the dream of Champagnat, to be the relief of so many generations of brothers and lay people who since 1817 continue to realise the dream of Champagnat.
 
Finally, a few words from Brother Tomás Briongos, Provincial, who began by asking young people ‘What would Champagnat tell us today if he were here?’ He encouraged young people to be salt and light for other young people, and gave thanks for what we are and for the experience of Brother Lisardo García, Coordinator of the Youth and Vocation Ministry Team, and a festive meal among the participants to end the event and celebration of a life shared throughout the two hundred years of the Marist Institute.
PREV

America Sur Region...

NEXT

To facilitate communication and enhance effic...