Service is Church’s core value says Cardinal Gracias

February 8, 2013 - Service is a core value of the Church of Christ who came to serve, not to be served. This was the central message of Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias on Thursday at the general body meeting of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), India’s Latin-rite bishops’ body, at the Marian Shrine of Vallainkanni, Tamil Nadu State. From Feb. 5-9, CCB I’s 160 Latin-rite bishops, secretaries, experts are holding their 25th plenary assembly on their pastoral plan for the Church in India. “Service is a core value to the Church and we, as disciples of Christ cannot sacrifice it for anything else”, Cardinal Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, told participants. Every organization or institution has some core values. Those core values are so basic that these organizations or institutions claim that they have those values as their very foundation. “What is the core value for the Church?” asked the cardinal who is president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, the apex body of the Church in the country. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many,” he said. Of course this value of service is to be understood as the expression of the most fundamental core value for us as disciples of Christ: “love”, the new commandment. The Church, universal, national and local, is called upon to be a community of service. At the international level today a clarion call is for the Church to raise her voice and to render whatever service is possible for the environment and for the betterment of humanity. At the national level the Church in India, reading to the signs of the times should come up to serve for the fight against corruption to help create a just and corruption-free society and to work for the elimination of poverty, illiteracy and inequality.