Friday, 10 August 2012 08:14

PROCLAIM CONFERENCE 2012

proclaim_2012_a3_poster

PROCLAIM 2012 is a conference on the New Evangelisation organised on behalf of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference by the National Office for Evangelisation and Catholic Mission.

The aim of PROCLAIM 2012 is to give people an understanding of the new evangelisation. It will also help attendees in building parishes that can evangelise effectively today. Some participants may already be actively engaged in the new evangelisation while others will be unfamiliar with the term and what it entails.

The focus is on parish evangelisation as the parishes are the communities given to us by the Church within which to live out our Catholic faith.

The PROCLAIM 2012 conference is being be held 9-11 August 2012 The Concourse in Chatswood.

It is a key event in the Year of Grace, to be celebrated by the Church from Pentecost 2012 to Pentecost 2013, an opportunity offered by the Australian Bishops to “start afresh from Christ”.

fisichella

"The Western world is in a big crisis. Not a financial or economic crisis -- the big crisis is anthropological," he says. "We need to answer the main questions of people today, which are 'Who am I?' and 'Where am I going?' " Archbishop RINO Fisichella, head of the Vatican Council for the New Evangelisation.

Certainly, an increasing number are not going to mass. The most recent church statistics show only 15.3 per cent of Australia's five million Catholics attend regularly.

The archbishop wants people to recognise that the parish is a community in which they need to participate.

"We need first of all to give an enthusiasm to our believers and send them to people who are baptised and said to be Christians, but have become indifferent, and don't participate any more in the life of the community," Archbishop Fisichella says.

"People should come back because they need to understand the value of a communitarian life. We want to fight against solitude, against loneliness."