Eight bishops from Latin America, five bishops from the United States, and six from Canada, gathered last week in Montreal for their annual meeting.
In addition to the theme of priests, talks at the four-day conference focused on the situation in Haiti after the earthquake that destroyed the capital last month, and killed the archbishop.
The meeting is part of a series of informal gatherings previously known as the Interamerican Meeting of Bishops, which was held every few years starting in 1967.
Since 1999, in view of Pope John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation, «Ecclesia in America,» the gathering has been called the Meeting of the Bishops of the Church in America, to emphasize the unity of the Church in the Western hemisphere.
The conference is now annual and in recent years, themes have included the family, media, the new evangelization and the growing secularism of society, and the personal encounter with Christ.
