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On 24th August the Pope solemnly opened the general assembly of all the Bishops of Latin America in the Cathedral of Bogota, Columbia. This was the second general episcopal conference to be held on the soil of South America, and the first meeting of a local Church on a continental scale since Vatican II. This assembly had been carefully prepared for over a year by bishops, theologians and experts from the whole of South America, in accordance with an express mandate from the Episcopal Commission of Latin America, created in the wake of the fast general assembly of the Bishops of Latin America held in 1955. The text which we publish below (thanks to the kind permission of the editor of ‘Informations Catholiques Internationales’) is the first half of the first part of the entire document, which consists of three parts in all: this description of the situation in the continent, a theological reflexion, and pastoral directions.
The general theme of the Medellin assembly was ‘the Church in the present transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council’. The conclusions of the assembly have since been published, but this comprehensive diagnosis of the facts remains striking from many points of view: the catching of a historic moment of awakening on the part of a whole continent, the detail and social awareness, the sense that ‘the difficult progress towards development and integration [in Latin America] could become an important catalyst in the process of unification to which the whole human race is converging today’, and the vivid realization that ‘the upheaval we are experiencing demands new attitudes of us so that we can carry through an urgent, global and profound reform of structures’ (from the Introduction to the Statement)—all these are remarkable in an ecclesiastical document.
‘The description could appear to be pessimistic, since we do not dwell on the positive factors, which do of course exist. But it is, nevertheless, a reflexion of the reality of Latin America, which is tragic, and which demands a swift and effective response.’
