2011-03-29 GENERAL HOUSE

Bureau of Brothers Today

The XXI General Chapter has urged us to set out for a new land, thus facilitating the birth of a new age for the Marist charism. The Constitutions and Statutes constitute a very appropriate means to taking up the journeys of personal and institutional conversion over the coming years.

Before the distribution of the new edition of the text, we invite you, in your Province and through characteristically simple Marist ceremonies, to give prominence to the historic moment we are living through and make official the transmission of the new edited text. For this purpose, the Secretariat BROTHERS TODAY is sending you a prayer service which can be used in a community or intercommunity celebration, or as part of any provincial event which brings together a significant number of Brothers. May the prayerful reading of our text help us to revitalize our vocation and to journey as pilgrims in the years leading up to the celebration of the bicentenary of our Institute.

With the new edition of our Constitutions and Statutes, the Institute begins a very interesting stage of reading and studying the present text, which will subsequently lead to a work, individual as well as community, of revision and proposals, resulting most likely in a new text which will be the subject of study and approbation at the XXII General Chapter.

We invite you to make use first of the text at the various special events programmed in your province. In the administrative units, formation processes for Brothers and for laity will be going on. In that case, we encourage the organizers to use the document and permit a greater familiarity with it.

The coming provincial retreats would be a very good opportunity for celebrating the handing over of the text as well as for taking up again some of the most important articles with regard to the renewal of our religious consecration. I hope that we can integrate them creatively into the programmes, whether in daily prayer or in the aids to prayer which will most likely be offered to the participants.

We invite the local communities as well to include in the drafting of the next community project a section  showing in what creative way or form they will arrange for the use and study of the Constitutions during the new school year. Very interesting initiatives will surely emerge for later sharing.

At the Bureau of Brothers Today, we want to offer a bank of aids which will allow Brothers and laity a profitable use and study of the Constitutions. We thank you for sending us any proposals, initiatives, concerns or suggestions which surface in your provinces, whether through yourself or someone you designate.

May the Lord Jesus, Mary, our companion on the way, and our Father Champagnat continue blessing us and accompanying us in this conversion of heart and in which a thorough revision of the Constitutions and Statutes, with the full participation of the Brothers, may help us to give new vitality to our vocation.

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Secretariat  Brothers Today

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Ceremony of delivering the Marist Constitutions and Statutes

Text of the Marist Constitutions and Statute

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