Bold new directions

From L to R Fr Young In Kim Gregorio, Fr Peter O’Neill, Kim Sun Hee, Sherryl Lou Capili, Fr Andrei Paz and Fr Salustino Villalobos Madrogon. Photo: St Columbans Mission Society

As you may know, our General Assembly has very recently concluded. This General Assembly 2024 took place in Lima, Peru from May 19 to June 15. These meetings take place every six years and one of the major events during the assembly is the election of a new General Council. This is the body that governs our Society and guides the Society in its mission over those six years, between General Assemblies.

At this assembly, our leaders and representatives elected for the first time a man from Asia. This is a major turning point since, from the foundation of the Society up until this meeting, our Society Leader or, as he was known in the past, Superior General, was from Ireland or the United States or Australia and was European or Caucasian. Our new Society Leader, Fr Andrei Paz, is from the Philippines.

Also, the other three members of this General Council include one Australian, Fr Peter O’Neill, as our Society Vicar, or second in command. The other two members are Youngin Kim Gregorio from South Korea and Salustino Villalobos Mondragon from Peru.

This is a very bold step, and we are grateful to the General Assembly for electing a Council to represent a totally new chapter in our Society’s history. Besides, this is one of the youngest councils in the history of the Society since three of the members were ordained in the present millennium.

But what is also providential or coincidental about this election is that this is only the second time we have held a General Assembly, or what was called a General Chapter, in Peru. The last time was in 1982 when the Chapter produced a historic document called “Columban Mission Today”.

I was just looking through my heavily underlined copy of this document and recalling a momentous decision taken by that Chapter. It says, “Responding to these considerations, and to other factors which emerged in the course of prolonged discussions and prayerful deliberations, the Chapter took the decision to establish a policy of inviting candidates from the local churches in which we work to become members of our Society and share in our missionary enterprise.” (n.153)

What the 1982 Chapter saw was that it was time for our Society to foster the missionary dimension of the local churches where we had spent many years working. The most significant way we could contribute to enabling the local churches to become more missionary was by accepting candidates from those churches or countries.

And now, after 42 years, we have a priest from one of those countries which we used to call “the missions” as distinct from the “home countries”. By electing Fr Andrei Paz as our Society Leader, the General Assembly 2024 challenges our Society to see ourselves as part of a Church that has embarked on the journey of synodality, a journey whereby local churches throughout the world along with women and men of diverse backgrounds share in the key decision-making processes by first of all listening to one another and discovering how the Spirit is calling us to explore new horizons that we could not see before.

Please keep Fr Andrei and his General Council in your prayers as they lead our Society into a new chapter of our ongoing history.

Fr Tom Rouse - Regional Councillor of Oceania