1 Boletin filipinas 159 - agustinos de la provincia del santisimo ...

4Mensaje del Prior ProvincialOCTUBREDICIEMBREMessage to all the Friars of the Province on the feast of the Santo Niño of Cebú 2012DEAR BROTHERS,As we all know the Augustinian Province of theMost Holy Name of Jesus of the Philippines havebeen celebrating the feast of the Santo Niñofrom the very origin of the province. We have theresponsibility to actualize the received heritageof our ancestors and making it meaningful fortoday in the new and ever challenging historicalsituations. Through out these years we have beenguided and protected by the Holy Spirit toencounter and to keep faithful to the commandof the Lord to continue making disciples of Jesusto all peoples.In this great day of joy I send all of you afraternal greeting and also my congratulationonce again, in the hope that we continue openedto the divine action in our evangelized concerns.We are the followers of Jesus from our humble lifeand the strength coming from our experience offaith. This experience of faith and our missionarytestimony are centered fundamentally in ChristJesus and his work of salvation for all mankind.From the very beginning of the evangelized workcarried out by the Augustinian Province ofPhilippines in the Far East until our time of thenew evangelization, we go on fulfilling with abelieving attitude our vocation of being sent toannounce the Gospel, celebrating the mystery ofour salvation and trying that this faith beactualized through the charity in a liberated hope.We need to revitalize continuously ourexperience of Christian faith, and this faith fillsour hearts for a better evangelized impulse. Aninward turn to the Holy Spirit makes everythingnew; we could answer to the challenges of thetimes and situations and we need to enter intothe process of new evangelization by adaptingvarious methods. The Pope Benedict XVI invitesus in his Apostolic Letter Porta fidei that wewant this Year to arouse in every believer theaspiration to profess the faith in fullness andwith renewed conviction, with confidence andhope. And to live this year that we are beginninglike a Year of faith. The celebration of the fiftiethanniversary of the Second Vatican Council andthe twentieth anniversary of the publication ofthe Catechism of the Catholic Church, areenough reasons to dedicate time to the renewalof our Christian experience of faith and to take anew impulse in order to face the challenge ofthe Synod on The new evangelization for thetransmission of the faith, that will take placeduring the month of October 2012. SaintAugustine said to the faithful when he was giventhe Symbol of faith that the faith of thebelievers “strengthened themselves by believing”(De utilitate credendi, 1,2) (Porta Fidei, 7).There are challenges that our modern world areoffering to the missionary and evangelizedactivity, they should be illuminated by theChristian faith and the new sceneries of theactual world: the secularized culture in manyregions of the world; the migrations; the meansof social communication and internet, thetechnology and transportations made everythingeasier to the humanity and shortened thedistances; the economy and their implications inthe human development and the crisis that weare sufferings; the scientific and technologicalinvestigation and their ambiguities, adding alsothe wide field of politics and their relations inthe world of the religions (cf. Lineamenta, 6).We are inviting to the missionary activity asmessengers of the salvation of God for thehumanity, so we should not forget in relation tothe new evangelization in order to face this taskin our global world.May this celebration of the feast of the SantoNiño be memory and prophecy, and we should beopened to the questionings coming to us fromthe human and ecclesial ambits.Fraternally,30 th December 2011Feast of the Holy Family