Latin America – From the Itinerant Team to REPAM’s Itinerant Network
Pope Francis begins his Apostolic Exhortation in this affectionate way: "Dear Amazonia". He invites us to "heart" the Amazon by itinerating with its peoples: "to think of itinerant missionary teams and to support the insertion and itinerancy of consecrated men and women with the most impoverished and excluded". Itinerate geographically and symbolically, learning to know, love and defend the Amazon with its people.
Laudato Si' affirms "everything is connected" (n. 16) and proposes an "integral ecology" (n. 10). The four Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus can only be assumed from a loving, integral, connected, "heartfelt" knowledge: "to show the way to God through the Spiritual Exercises and discernment", leads us to "walk with the poor, the discarded of the world, those whose dignity is violated in a mission of reconciliation and justice". It also encourages us to "accompany young people in the creation of a hopeful future" and to "collaborate in the care of our Common Home".
Claudio Perani, SJ, founder of the Itinerant Team (EI), formulated in his intuition: "Walk through the Amazon and listen to what the people are saying: their demands and hopes, their problems and solutions, their utopias and dreams. Participate in the daily life of the people. Take notes and carefully record everything, in the people's own words. Do not worry about the results, the Spirit will show you the way. Courage! Start where you can.
In the life on mission, in the open, of the IE, the four PAUs are connected, they are "heartfelt". A true spiritual itinerancy towards God leads to complicating life where it is threatened, loving the poor, caring for the future of the young and defending the life of all beings of the Common Home with whom we are community, "brothers and sisters of milk", of creation.
The Itinerant Team integrates faith-life-mission, spirituality in the open that allows us to leave our comfort zone: "to be with whom no one, where no one and how no one wants to be", where the wounds are more open and life is more threatened. Lay people, religious, parents who make "community-on-the-road" in cities and villages, like Jesus (Lk 8:1ff), serving the Kingdom of Justice. Its mission is geopolitical: love-care-defend abundant Life (Jn 10:10), Good Living-Amazonian Living. It is "Church going out", itinerant: "The intimacy of the Church with Jesus is an itinerant intimacy, and communion "is essentially configured as missionary communion"" (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 1). (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 23).
The IE promotes a connected Amazonian territorial cosmovision, also geopolitical, "from within", discerns the mission with the people, walking together, synodically, generates processes, weaves cross-border networks to face the great Amazonian challenges. Adding charisms, cultures, personalities, congregations, institutions, to go together where we cannot and should not go alone. Diversity is a Trinitarian theological principle of IE: the more diverse the more divine, if we maintain unity in diversity and complementarity.
The itinerant service is "trinitarily" complementary to the institutional and inserted services of the mission:
- institutional, "God the Father": gives stability and continuity to the mission. Example: schools, hospitals, retreat houses, parishes.
- Insertion, "God the Son": gives proximity, "incarnation" with the poor and the wounds of the planet. Example: basic communities, rural, inserted, urban peripheries, villages.
- Itinerant, "Holy Spirit": reaches where institutions and insertions do not reach, gives visibility, connectivity, inclusion and unity between both sides of the borders (geographical, symbolic).
The more balanced and articulated these three missionary services are in the apostolic body, the greater the impact will be.
The Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM) and the Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Religious (CLAR), with the experience of the IE and other mobile missionary teams, weave today the Itinerant Network whose first meeting was in Manaus, in August 2019, with 60 participants from seven Amazonian countries.
The Synod of the Amazon (October 2019) was (is) kairos. Sr. Arizete Miranda CNS-CSA, foundress of the IE, had a fundamental intervention as synod mother and the Pope quoted her in plenary: "Sr. Miranda has said a key word that UNBELIEVES: The Amazonian itinerancy overflows, beyond our control: it opens to the Spirit, Providence takes care of us and leads us by the hand of the people and the poor.
The final document reinforces the DISBURSEMENT of the ITINERANCE:
"Jesus indicates to us, his disciples, that our mission in the world cannot be static, but itinerant. The Christian is an itinerant" (n. 21).
"The itinerant missionary teams in the Amazon, weaving and building community along the way, help to strengthen ecclesial synodality. They can unite various charisms, institutions and congregations, lay men and women, religious men and women, priests. They can join together to reach together where alone they cannot" (n. 39).
"We propose an itinerant network that brings together the various efforts of the teams that accompany and energize the life and faith of the communities in the Amazon" (n. 40).
"We support the insertion and itinerary of
consecrated men and women among the most impoverished and excluded" (n.
98).
May the Spirit of God encourage us to go out into deeper waters and cast our nets to fish (Lk 5:4) with the DEAR AMAZON.
Source: CPAL
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