austraLasia #2646 Bishops galore! Oceania, now Turin
SYDNEY, ROME & TURIN: 19 May 2010 -- The arrival of bishop
(in fact now coadjutor archbishop ) Francesco Panfilo in Rome these
days - he had just come from Sydney - is a reminder of two significant
events involving a goodly number of Salesian bishops.
The first of these events has already concluded: the
Assembly of the Federation of Bishops Conferences of Oceania. For
those who have little knowledge of what countries actually make up the
'continent' of Oceania, bishops from each of the following were in
attendance: Australia, Cook
Islands, Fiji, Guam,
Kiribati (which includes Nauru in
its diocese), Marianas Islands, New
Zealand, New Caledonia, Papua
New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Wallis & Futuna, Samoa,
Tokelau, Tuvalu, Tonga, Tahiti. Three Salesian bishops are
represented in that group - Tim Costelloe, Australia, Luciano Capelli,
Solomon Islands, and Francesco Panfilo, Papua New Guinea. The Salesians
are present in six of the eighteen countries named above, but the
membership of both the Assembly and the 'continent is a little wider
still: we need to include American Samoa, Federated States of
Micronesia (Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae), and who knows we might
still have missed an island or two!
The Bishops' Oceania Assembly, this time held in
Sydney, is a four yearly affair and also had representation from the
Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences and from East Timor. If we
wanted to consider Salesian Bishops from that wider area, then we would
need to add in a further nine who are resident in Asia (three in the
Philippines, two in Vietnam, and one in each of Myanmar, China,
Thailand and Japan), though these were not present in Sydney.
The Assembly, with the help of various speakers,
including religious and lay, considered the missionary life of St Paul,
often only heard about "in the unwinnable spot in the second Reading!",
preaching today in the context of media saturation, sacraments,
especially Eucharist in lonely, isolated outposts where it is difficult
for Catholics to have access to a priest, and of course the Sisters of
St Joseph spoke about the process which will lead to the Canonisation
of Mary McKillop in Rome on 17 October 2010. The overal theme of the
Assembly was 'Taking the message of Christ forward'.
Meanwhile, a similarly-sized number of bishops (just
under 100) will be gathering in Turin from 21-25 May around the Rector
Major and his Council for at least the second occasion when all
Salesian bishops have been invited by the Rector Major, though as one
wag quipped it has to be at least the third time, since we know Don
Bosco invited the then Bishop Cagliero! You can follow the programme
and the list of participants for this meeting from here. Ten
of the twelve EAO bishops will be in Turin for the occasion. _________________ AustraLasia is an
email
service
for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions
as an
agency for ANS based in
Rome.
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