frpaolom / Instagram
CV NEWS FEED // The Apostolic Vicar of southern Arabia has issued his first pastoral letter, in which he centered his message on “Christian formation” in the modern context.
As reported by AsiaNews, Msgr. Paolo Martinelli recently released his first apostolic letter as Vicar of the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen, titled, “’Not slaves, but children’: Christian formation for the third millennium, in the context of a multicultural, multilingual and multi-rite migrant Church in the Arab Gulf.”
The Vicar stressed in his missive an urgent need to develop evangelization among the faithful at large, but also with particular respect to the region of his jurisdiction, which he described as “faced with challenges.”
The Church must work to respond with “means and contents that respond and correspond to the needs of the faithful,” Martinelli wrote, “especially young people, and of the Church of the Gulf.”
It is not sufficient, he continued, for members of the Church to be guided by convention—rather, the Church must lead “with conviction,” elucidating clearly to the faithful “the reasons why one believes.”
Martinelli emphasized that while it is important that “we all need to be continually formed in the faith, children, young people, and adults, Christian education is not to be used as a mere tool that “end[s] with the transmission of the contents of faith.”
An education, he asserted, must bring about “a new mentality, a new way of reading history, and society in all its aspects.” Only then is it possible to understand and “fully assume the cultural dimension of faith” that adopts the search for God with authenticity.
A person should “get to know himself, his limits, and his resources,” along the path of education, “to the point of asking himself very concrete questions.”
For this reason, Martinelli highlighted the important role of Catholic schools and universities in playing the role of revitalizing culture. Catholic schools, he stated, “are a constitutive part of the mission of the Church, precisely because of the dialogical capacity that it can offer.”
The vast majority of Catholics in the Arabian Peninsula are immigrants from the Philippines, India and Vietnam who take on the hardest jobs in the rich region.
