Hope – central message of Asian Catholic Laity Congress

(September 4, 2010) The Congress of Asian Catholic Laity ended today with Cardinal Nicholas Cheong Jinsul, Archbishop of Seoul celebrating the conclusive Mass in the city cathedral. Before the final blessing a suggestive ceremony was held in which each participant received a small cross and a rosary from Pope Benedict XVI as symbols of their missionary mandate. The Aug. 31 – Sept 5 congress in the South Korean capital, Seoul, had as its theme, “Proclaiming Jesus Christ in Asia Today.” Earlier on Saturday, Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity summed up the entire work of the congress in one word: hope. He said that despite our outstanding and celebrated scientific and technological progress, our world is permeated by a painful inability to hope. And because man cannot live without hope, the great mission of witnessing to hope is looming before the Christians in Asia. “Each Christian’s words and life,” he said, “must make this proclamation resound: God loves you, Christ came for you, Christ is for you ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life!’ Cardinal Rylko lamented that “even among Christians a relativistic mind-set that creates no small amount of confusion about mission has taken root and is spreading.” He mentioned, for example, the tendency to replace mission with a dialogue in which all positions are equal. The tendency to reduce evangelization to the simple task of human development, believing that it is enough to help people to become more human or more faithful to their own religion, is a false concept of respecting the freedom of others, which leads to relinquishing the call to conversion, the cardinal pointed out. The Vatican official stressed that there can be no true evangelization without the explicit proclamation of Jesus as Lord by word and witness of life. He said that evangelization is not an ancillary activity of the Church, but rather the very reason for being of the Church, the Sacrament of salvation.