At the Service of the Peripheries

A few days ago, the secretariat of the International Catholic Action Forum, in Rome for its yearly meeting, met Father Alexandre Awi Mello, Secretary of the Dicastery, Linda Ghisoni, Undersecretary for the Laity section and Father Giovanni Buontempo, in charge of relations with ecclesial movements and new communities. Msgr. Eduardo Garcia, the FIAC ecclesiastical assistant, and Rafael Corso, the coordinator of the secretariat, were present together with representatives of the five countries that, for the current four-year period, compose the secretariat: Senegal and Burundi for Africa, Italy and Spain for Europe, Argentina for the Americas.

In his presentation of the FIAC's future programs, President Corso stressed that the echo of the meeting held by the FIAC world representatives with Pope Francis on 27 April 2017 is still great. The speech given by the Holy Father on that occasion contains the inspiring principles that have been guiding the whole FIAC apostolate in recent months. Three elements were specially highlighted: Catholic Action’s desire to be a community of faithful baptized in “a mission for all and with all;” the hope to incarnate the global vision of the laity proposed by Pope Francis in his speech in models and concrete proposals to be carried out together with local actors in every region of the world where AC is present; finally, the will to live as a people of God that accompanies those who suffer, thus becoming a community of service on the world’s existential and geographical peripheries.