Finalising the last details

A meeting took place in the General House from the 2nd to the 4th November 2006 of the consultative Council for the Mission Ad Gentes project to follow up work commenced in the month of May of this same year. The Council is formed by Brothers Luis García Sobrado, Peter Rodney, Michael Flanigan, Tom Chin and Father Joseph Doan, SJ and had as its aim to help the project?s co-ordination team to deepen its reflection on concrete themes and to come to some recommendations of concrete action.
Throughout the working days that the Council had in Rome, there was time for reflection on the strategies that must be put in place in order to start the opening of new missions where the brothers who are finishing the discernment course at Davao will be sent. These new presences demand an infrastructure and an institutional organisation of support to keep the impetus and the contact with the whole of the Institute. A great part of the reflection was centred on the characteristics that this new animation structure must have.
The Mission Ad Gentes project which proposes to send between one hundred and fifty and two hundred brothers to the service of the Church in Asia, anticipates also the possibility of the participation of lay Marists. This new dimension demands that we make previsions concerning the social security of participants, for brothers as well as laypeople, on the subject of situations of illness, retirement, etc. And this is all the more necessary seeing that the participants are going to go into countries having structures and a social organisation that are very diverse.
A vast and profound reflection took place on the Church in Asia, especially following the First Asian Missionary Congress which took place recently, the first of its kind to be celebrated on the Asian Continent, and which was organised in Thailand by the Federation of the Episcopal Conferences of Asia, from the 18th to the 22nd October.
The next meeting of the consultative Council will take place on the 26th, 27th and 28th April 2007, when the first protagonists of the mission will be in place in the locations where they will have been sent.