(Vatican Radio) The bishops of Poland are making their ad limina visits this
week. Among the issues that have come up during the course of bishops’ conversations
and small group meetings with Pope Francis are: the situation of families today, with
special focus on the problem of declining birth rates and on cultural challenges to
the traditional family, and the New Evangelization.
Bishop Piotr Libera of
the diocese of Plock, in Poland, told Vatican Radio that he asked the Holy Father
for some specific ideas to help make local Churches more “kerygmatic” - that is,
better oriented to the proclamation of the Good News of salvation. “Our older priests
who are not accustomed to this type of preaching the Gospel,” he explained, “are struggling,
sometimes they are somewhat ‘closed.’” Bishop Libera related that the Holy Father
responded, saying that you have to start from the seminaries, and that seminarians
need to learn the missionary spirit.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Warsaw, Kazimierz
Nycz, expressed his happiness at the meetings, which he described as extremely interesting.
“We talked about the problems of our Church in Poland,” he said, adding, “The Holy
Father said that the Church's problems are universal,” – the problems of the Church
in every part of the world.
The Polish city of Krakow is to host the 2016 World
Youth Day, with cooperation and assistance from all the dioceses in the country.
It will be the second international iteration of the event to be held in Poland, after
the VI World Youth Day in Czestochowa, in August, 1991. Listen: