The Mission is the work of the Spirit… The Spirit is the first agent of evangelization! How many times have we said or heard these statements! But it is not enough to hear and pronounce them. We must ever deepen this reality, and make it alive and operative in our daily living and in our actions as missionaries. We are now going through the experiences of our centennial year, the centenary of our Mission. Our General Government officially invited us to reflect on our missionary history and present way of being missionaries. Furthermore, we are supposed to take a good look at how we are “mediators of the mysteries of salvation” in the concrete situations of the mission today. Bruno Forte offers us some directions in one of his precious contributions to the cause of the missions, a paper he delivered to the World Mission Congress: it helps us deepen our understanding of how the Mission can be concretized in the Spirit.
Fr. Albert Trevisiol gives us one more of his studies on the mission: “We Are for the Pagans”, the text of a lecture he gave last June in the IMC Meeting of the celebrations of our Centennial Year. In it, he underlines the need and the challenge for us to grow in the human and missionary adventure that meeting others constitutes: dialogue, exchange of ideas, searching together for the Face of the Father… all in an attitude of brotherhood, sharing, and readiness to give and to receive, so that, in today’s world, we may become what we are supposed to be.
The challenge to better understand our missionary experience is given to us in an article by Fr. Antholy Bellagamba: We are “Called To Be Sent”. How can we understand this? We find some proposals in this article, proposals that need confirmation, improvement, fulfillment – according to the author’s explicit request.
The last contribution to this issue is a presentation (very succint, indeed) of the doctoral thesis on Moral Theology by Fr. Hipoliti Marandu. It is a corageous and strong piece of investigation on how much the present world economic order is unjust, and on its consequences on the people of Mozambique. We deem it a valuable example of analysis and investigative report, especially for the missionaries who work in the countries of the Southern Hemisphere.
We invite you to read and to mediate.