“In virtue of our Gospel mandate, the Church willingly goes to people on the margins to affirm their dignity and foster their full inclusion in society,” Archbishop Richard Smith told CCCB’s annual plenary Sept. 23. “Yet as we go to the edge, many seek to keep us there, even push us over.
“The trends we see are worrying, yes, but hardly surprising,” Smith told the more than 80 bishops from across Canada gathered for the annual plenary. “For the Church faithful to her Lord it was ever thus.”
Smith said he visited Ukraine in August when the Greek Catholic Church marked the 1,025th anniversary of the baptism of the Kiyvan-Rus with the consecration of a new cathedral.
“For generations, the Greek Catholic Church in that land lived not just in the peripheries but was actually forced underground,” he said. The anniversary celebration was made possible by the “power of faithful witness.”
The example of Ukrainian Catholics “can serve as an inspiration to us in Canada,” Smith said.
“In admittedly different circumstances, the Church is needing to confront in our own country pressures seeking to relegate us to the margins,” he said.
“This is turning the question of the relationship of the Church to the periphery on its head.”
The current debate in Quebec over the proposed Charter of Quebec Values is one of the most recent manifestations of tensions in the relationship of religion and state. The proposed charter would ban public sector workers from wearing any religious signs or attire except for discreet pieces of jewellery. It would, however, allow the crucifix to remain in the National Assembly.
“The political parties have good intentions to leave the crucifix in the National Assembly as a vestige of Quebec’s cultural and historical patrimony," CCCB vice-president Paul-André Durocher, who celebrated the plenary’s opening eucharistic liturgy, said in his homily.
But for believers, the crucifix is much more than a reminder of the past. It is a living symbol of the call which we live, and even more of the One who lives in us, he said. The crucifix reminds us that life will take its deepest meaning when we are open to the love that comes from above and that we consecrate ourselves to share this love among us.
Jacques Cartier planted a cross the first time he landed on what would eventually become Canadian soil, Durocher said. Our mission is to replant the cross on Canadian soil all the days of our life, wherever we go, in witness of our faith, sharing hope and love which pushes us to go to meet the other to help him to live abundantly.
Smith recalled the excitement in Rome when Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio stepped onto the balcony after being elected Pope, taking the name Francis.
“From that moment, and consistently ever since, he has summoned all of us to a ministry and mission that places at the centre of our concern all those whom society relegates to the peripheries,” the president said, noting his messages of “heartfelt concern.”
“Through his visits to youth in a Roman jail, to migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa, or to the destitute of a Brazilian favela, the Holy Father is summoning the whole Church to be embraced by the energy of divine love and to allow its dynamism to send us forth anew on mission,” said Smith, who wraps up his two-year term as CCCB president at the plenary close.
Smith spoke of the lightning bolt that struck St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome the day Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation from office.
“For eight years we had loved and followed him as our Holy Father, and were eyewitnesses and beneficiaries of an extraordinary papal magisterium,” he said. “In Pope Benedict XVI both Church and world were blessed with a wonderfully gifted teacher, who in every letter, speech, message and homily of his Petrine ministry explained the faith in a manner at once intelligible and attractive.
“His personal qualities that lay beneath and gave shape to his ministry came undeniably to the fore in his act of resignation: humility, simplicity, courage and complete self-surrender for the good of the Church,” he said.
The election of Pope Francis was another “bolt from the blue,” Smith said. He said this year’s plenary assembly “will be largely shaped” by Pope Francis’ call to consider those on the margins.