At a recent meeting between some Portuguese bishops and Pope Benedict XVI, a dialog took place that is very instructive on how this pope is pointing out the need for changing old attitudes. He told the bishops that the Church "should not, above all, speak of itself, but of God.”
There will always be the need to deal with Church issues such as organization and who tends to what responsibilities, but he said these issues "should not distract us from the authentic mission of the Church."
"One doesn't begin to be a Christian because of an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather because of an encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives new horizons to life, and with that, a decisive orientation. The evangelization of the person and of human communities depends totally on this encounter with Jesus Christ."
According to Benedict XVI, "the most frequent confession on the lips of Christians has been the lack of participation in community life." And the result of less community life is “the growing wave of Christians that are not practicing.” The need now is to evaluate the initiation processes preparing people to be Church members so that they can “take on in their lives an authentically Eucharistic stamp that makes them capable of giving reason for their hope in an adequate way for our times."
"It is necessary," he said, "to change the organizational style of the Portuguese Church community and the mentality of its members, to have a Church in tune with Vatican II, in which the function of clergy and laypeople is well-defined, taking into account the fact that we are all one, since we were baptized and integrated into the family of the children of God, and all of us have a common responsibility for the growth of the Church."
Don't you think the same could be said to us?
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