28 January
Saint Thomas Aquinas
1947, the first Marist Brothers left to begin work in Portugal
20/04/2015: France
Mission Assembly- Nairobi 2014
Closing words of Brother Óscar Martin Vicario, Provincial de Compostela, Chairman of the European Marist Conference.
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Dear Marists of Europe,
From this house, in January 1830, Fr. Champagnat wrote to Bro. Bartolomé and the brothers in his community. It is a well-known letter. It sounds very attractive to our ears when we reread it 185 years later. It seems these words of Marcellin are attached to the walls and they are addressed to us, today, the Marists of Europe.
These sentences of Champagnat are inviting us to trust and gratefulness for our history in Marist Europe, a nearly 200 year’s history. They are inviting us to dare in hope, as well.
So my message at the end is a word of gratitude to you all for this living Assembly that we have been celebrating. Thank you for your passion in your educational, social and evangelizing work which you are doing day by day in Marist Europe.
Now it is the time for witness and action. It is the time to answer the calls of the Montagnes whose faces and names we have remembered during the Assembly. Young people, we have said, are asking us to live authentic meaningful lives, to be close to them ... and our response has to be generous and fast.
Therefore, besides gratitude, I want my message to be a message of courage and of passion. Because the European children still need us today. Because, as we have experienced here, richness and communion can grow in diversity; because we share the dream of Champagnat to reincarnate it in Europe today.
How important and symbolic it is, that this dream is reborn right here.
On behalf of the Board of CEM and of the Provincials; Brendan, Maurice, Ambrosio, Antonio and myself, I thank you all for your participation. Thanks also to the Preparatory Commission for their excellent work. Thanks to all who have provided services of translation, decoration, animation and the secretariat. Thanks to the Community of this house for their warm Marist welcome. Let us now have the courage to daring in hope so that the new dawn we are waiting for will arise, on our way to the bicentenary; let a new beginning of Marist life happen in Europe.
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Brother Óscar Martin Vicario,
Provincial de Compostela, Chairman of the CEM.
Mission Assembly- Nairobi 2014
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