Cardinal Luis José Rueda, archbishop of Bogotá and Primado de Colombia, said that “the bishop cannot live his ministry in solitude”, within the framework of the 119 ° Assembly of the Colombian Episcopate.
In dialogue with the CEC press office, the purple explained that “the bishop, when ordered, receives a sacramental grace: the full priesthood. The final document of the Synod has reminded us, in the light of The light of the nationsthat the episcopal ministry is In, with and for the community ”.
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“And when we talk about the community, we talk about all the baptized, men and women, of the ordered ministers, of the female and male consecrated life, of the laity, which is the thick group of the Church,” said the archbishop.
Therefore, the primacy of Colombia stressed, “the bishop cannot live his ministry in solitude, he has to live it in community, in fraternity and is a synodality server.”
The cardinal stressed that the bishop is “the entrance door of the synodality”, because “the bishop is the harmonizer of diversities in the light of the Holy Spirit. And that is work. And that is the synodal mission that is recommended to the bishop.”
When talking about the current phase of the Synod, which is that of implementation in the private churches, Cardinal Rueda stressed that “it is important that each bishop in its jurisdiction constitutes the committee or the accompanying community, of motivation, of making the synodality travel in its particular church.”
The bishop must be accompanied
In his reflection on the synodal mission of each bishop and before the bishops who participate in the 119 ° CEC Assembly, the cardinal stressed that “it is very important that it be recognized that the bishops need to be accompanied, we do not know everything, we do not have all the answers to all the questions that the people of God have”.
“One of the tasks of (Archbishop) Metropolitan is the promotion of fraternity in the bishops of the dioceses of the province. I would like to suggest taking into account the emeritus bishops who are in regions of the province,” the cardinal continued, according to the CEC press office.
The Metropolitan Archbishop is the one who presides over an ecclesiastical province, on which in some ways the other dioceses that comprise it and that are known as suffragans depend.
Its purpose is of integration, pastoral coordination and mutual service. The Metropolitan Archbishop is a cousin inter pairs (First among equals). Before a problem in your province, it must have pastoral and fraternal application to help solve it.
“We are fragile”
Colombia’s primacy also told his bishops’ brothers that it is important “to recognize that we are also fragile, to recognize that we have many things to improve and rebuild in our lives. As we do not show each other perfect, the expectation in the people of God changes.”
After highlighting the importance of the bishop having a spiritual and confessor director, the purple recalled: “We bishops are the missionaries of harmony in the Church. We are missionaries and servants of harmony in the people of God, with the strength of the Spirit.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.