The desire for a new missionary impulse for the Church in Puerto Rico has prompted its bishops to hold an Extraordinary Missionary Year, which will begin on January 13th (feast of the Baptism of the Lord) and will end on October 19 ( eve of World Mission Sunday).
In a statement sent to Fides News Agency the five ordinaries of the country report that the objectives of the initiative are the same that Pope Francis indicated for the Extraordinary Missionary Month of October 2019, namely: revive the baptismal conscience in relation to the mission of the Church; awaken the conscience of the mission ad gentes; resume with a new impulse the responsibility to proclaim the Gospel; awaken a missionary vitality and place the mission of Jesus in the heart of the Church itself.
To do this, the Bishops have indicated a path in three stages and are based on three «calls»: that of personal and pastoral conversion; the call to communion; and finally that of the mission lived in concrete, according to the classical method for the Latin American Church, made of «looking, discerning and acting».
From the Baptism of the Lord to the Easter Vigil will be time to «look at our personal, community and ecclesial reality» to see it again, revive the baptismal commitment and ignite the personal commitment of a «meaningful change that will help us to witness faith in a society which every day is more and more secularized», reads the note. Easter time will be the opportunity for each pastoral operator to «discern what the Spirit says to the Churches» (Revelation 2, 29) in this historical moment, guided by the reading of the Acts of the Apostles. The Extraordinary Missionary Year will end with a solemn mass in which the sixth American Missionary Congress (CAM 6) will be launched, which will take place in Puerto Rico in 2023, in the diocese of Ponce.
