Accra (Greater Accra) 25 March 2003- Professor George Hagan, Chairman of the National Commission for Culture (NCC), on Monday, said evangelisation of the word of God in the era of globalisation, needed to recognise the multi-cultural context of the world in which the word is proclaimed.
"We live in an
intensely interactive world fraught with a polyglot of conflicting ideas of a
supreme being. Evangelisation is therefore, confronted with many profound and
difficult challenges".
Prof. Hagan said this
at the opening a four-day conference for about 60 Catholic clergies from 30
African countries in Accra. The conference, organised by the Pontifical Council
for Culture, Vatican City was under the theme: "Handing on the Faith at
the Heart of Africa: Pastoral approaches to culture in the formation of
Africa".
He said Africans
should affirm and attain total emancipation and participation in dignity and
divinity of Christ through the proclamation of the word of God and its
transforming power.
Prof Hagan urged the
clergies to mutually recognise each other's cultural dignity and identity and
be able to tolerate and accommodate one's cultural ideas and values as a basis
for discourse relating to differences.
He emphasised the
need for the recognition of shared values and common humanity as a means of
avoiding a sense of alienation, hostility and conflict among people of
different cultures and faith.
Prof Hagan said the
best approach to the evangelisation of culture was to demonstrate that both the
evangeliser and the recipient of the faith were searching for salvation. Pope
John Paul II, the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church, in a message read
for him, called on the Catholic clergies to have a solid formation in the true
cultural values of their various countries.
This, he said, should
be done in a sense of honesty, responsibility and integrity and should also
entail the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their
integration and insertion of Christianity in various human cultures.
Pope John Paul said
the issue of culture was an area of crucial concern for the church, especially
in Africa, "touching as it does upon the gospel". He urged
participants to see the importance of culture in their ministries and he hoped
the conference would help future priests to have an awareness of the culture of
a country they would find themselves in for effectiveness of evangelisation.
Reverend Father
Bernard Ardura, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture of the Vatican
City, said culture played a very vital role in the development of every nation
and urged clergies to take it upon themselves to learn the culture of where they
worked, accept them and integrate them into their evangelisation programmes.
GRi.../
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