Saturday, March 28, 2020
The Combonis in Brazil, in dialogue with the local Church, are trying to concretise paths of commitment and cooperation to take up the challenges of the Amazonia Synod. In the document they propose that “all our confreres, renewing our commitment and working out together how we can live it at Institute level.” The missionaries say they will “assuming the profound conversion to Christ and his Gospel of our mission plans and structures in Amazonia.

The Comboni Missionaries present in Brazil sign ‘the Comboni Pact on the Common Home.’ “This is a personal and collective agreement that takes its inspiration from the Pact of the Catacombs for the Common Home, agreed by many bishops, priests, men and women religious and lay people, during the Amazonia Synod. In Brazil, this commitment has been rewritten in a Comboni fashion, based upon the challenges taken up by the Comboni communities in the country.”

In the document they propose that “all our confreres, renewing our commitment and working out together how we can live it at Institute level.” The missionaries say they will “assuming the profound conversion to Christ and his Gospel of our mission plans and structures in Amazonia. To consolidate Comboni presence in Amazonia. To incarnate in our Amazonian parishes and presences, a Church that is prophetic, Samaritan, Magdalen and Marian (cf. Final Document, No. 22).”

“To celebrating the faith, walking with the people of God, in communion with all of creation, to contemplate the cosmic dimension of the Eucharistic celebration and making progress in the inculturation of the liturgy and of spirituality; to study the paradigm of Integral Ecology, rejecting, in our missionary praxis, false solutions and shortcuts, to create an economy based on just and sustainable relations to remove from our communities all forms of colonialist, racist, patriarchal and exclusive mentality, and valuing cultural differences; to Insist upon a pastoral of presence that is friendly towards the poor and close to their life, using a style of life pastoral that is increasingly ecumenical and synodal.”

The Comboni Missionaries insist that it is important to reinterpret the Good Shepherd’s charism of St. Daniel Comboni; to being committed to ensuring that women begin new processes of leadership in our communities and in the Church;  to assuming, in the face of the avalanche of consumerism, a style of life that is joyously sober, simple and in solidarity with the people who have little or nothing; reducing the production of waste and the use of plastic, and fostering the production and commercialisation of agro-ecological products and using, as far as possible, public means of transport.”

“To stimulating the Churches of the global North to come together in condemning the economic model of the sacking of Amazonia, making the companies and governments of those countries feel more responsible for the violations that occur in our lands; supporting especially the campaign for disinvestment in predatory mining.

Finally the Comboni Missionaries decide “to commit themselves to keeping alive the memory of the martyrs and assuming with them and the original peoples the commitment to defend their territories”.
[Comboni Missionaries]