International Association of Catholic Missiologists

 

Position Papers

 Rev. Dr. Bertrand Roy coordinated the dynamics of the Workshop Encounter. Five principal papers were presented at plenary sessions. There was also a paper reacting to one of the principal papers. Fr. John Prior, SVD, articulated  the following summary of the position papers:  

a)      Rev. Dr. Joseph Mattam, S.J. (India): “The Message of Jesus and Our Customary Theological Language. Fr. Mattam spoke of the need to get behind biblical language to the primal paschal event when such biblical language is incomprehensible in linguistic worlds other than the Semitic, for instance in South Asia. Mattam called for a radical “back to basics” and for the freedom to express our Catholic faith in linguistics.

b)     Rev. Dr. Sergei Shirokov (Russia): “The Icon as Theological Language: A Case in Missiological Dialogue between East and West.” Fr. Shirokov spoke of icons as a theological language which unites theology with worship and life, and indeed are an intercultural theology of prayer, reflection and faith. He reminded all that the Catholic tradition is wider than that of the Latin rite or Eastern rite and broader than that of Churches in full communion with any of these two traditions. Indeed the Indian participants came from the 2,000 year-old Syrian tradition which parallels that of the Latins and Greeks. We have three living, Catholic, ecclesial sources to draw from.

c)      Sr. Prof. Teresa Okure, SHCJ, (a New Testament scholar from Catholic Institute of West Africa (CIWA), Port Harcourt, Nigeria),  gave the foundational address on “The Diversity of Theological Language in the New Testament”. Teresa sees theological language as essentially a language of accountability for what God has done in and for us in Jesus the Christ. The wide diversity of NT theological language challenges us to get in touch with God’s decisive intervention in our personal lives, to rejoice and respond to this intervention and make it the springboard of our theologizing. NT theologies spring from the life of believing communities as they strive to discern what God is doing in human history and how they might witness to God’s saving presence. “No language is sacred”, she declared; we should listen to the theologies of the people, especially of grassroots groups. In the last analysis Jesus is “God’s own theological language” and ever-active Word among us.

d)     Fr. Eleazar Lopez, of Mexico’s Zapoteca people, spoke strongly and passionately on dialogue with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a dialogue so necessary not only for the protagonists themselves but for the future of the Church and of creation itself given the urgent ecological crisis. Eleazar advocates ongoing theological reflection among the indigenous peoples of Latin America through the National Centre for Support of Indigenous Missions and the Latin American Ecumenical Articulation of Indigenous Pastoral (AELAPI).

e)      Rev. Dr. Lance Nadeau, MM, (an American Maryknoll missionary living in Nairobi, Kenya), spoke of a new theological language in-the-making among Kenyan AIDS ministers, most of whom are women and lay. The paschal mystery is opening up a culture of death-denial to an appreciation of death as a positive, conscious act of faith. This life-affirming paschal theology arising from amidst the AIDS pandemic needs to be heard wherever death-dealing forces are tending to reduce people to a resigned negativity.

f)        Rev. Dr. Francis A. Oborji (a Nigerian Missiologist), gave a synopsis of his response to the last paper by Dr. Lance Nadeau, in a paper entitled: “The Theological Language in Africa: A Missiological Reflection.” Fr. Oborji speaks of a language of theology in Africa which seeks spontaneously a more universal Christian theology that will connect the African people with the whole of humanity and history of salvation. In such a theology, one sees the effort to link the African ancestral world view and the African people with the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God; and which speaks of the universal brotherhood of the human family. The paper dismisses the assumption that the Africans have a culture of death-denial and lack of eschatological speculations. The African spiritual world view revolves around their concept of life and of the after-life as well as the respect they give to the dying person. The African culture and tradition are characterized by spiritual world view on life that could be gleaned by people’s belief in the One Supreme God, their sense of the after-life and veneration of ancestors. The paper calls for a new theological language that will replace the prevailing language of missiology which often speaks in derogatory terms about the African culture and people and which seeks always   to associate Africa with any embarrassing human problem. In particular, the paper decries the current tendency to label Africa as a continent of HIV/AIDS carriers. It notes that recent reaches have shown that in most African villages and towns where there are no foreign presence, we do not have cases of HIV/AIDS. All this means that the whole truth about the spread of this killer disease in Africa and other places, is not yet told.

 Shorter Communications

These were delivered in three parallel groups. Each participant had the opportunity to hear two or three papers:

a)      From Europe: Dr. Patrizia Pelosi and Rev. Dr. Giuseppe Buono, PIME: “Bio-Ethics: A New Missiological Language.”

b)      From North America: Rev. François Jacques: “The Mission to Quebec and Its call for a New Theological Language.”

c)      From Asia: Rev. Dr. John Mansford Prior, SVD: “The Language of Ritual and Rights in Eastern Indonesia.”

d)      From Latin America: Sr. Gabriella Zangarini, OP: My search for a Theological Language based on the life Experience of Women.”

e)      From Europe: Rev. Fr. Marek Rostkowski, OMI: “Language as instrument of inculturation according to Church documents.”