Chai Brady
Due to its impact on young Catholics in Africa, fundamentalism will be a topic that bishops from East Africa prioritize in their talks with other delegates during the synod’s intervention sessions.
More than 300 delegates, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, sisters and laypeople are expected to attend the Oct. 3-28 Synod of Bishops, which will meet at the Vatican to discuss “young people, faith and vocational discernment.”
Bishops from the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa also will take to the synod topics such as young people as protagonists, the training of spiritual directors and holistic formation in Catholic schools and universities.
Known by its acronym AMECEA, the group includes the bishops’ conferences of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Djibouti and Somalia.
Maryknoll Father Joseph Healey, a facilitator at AMECEA’s Sept. 4-7 preparatory meeting on the synod, said young Catholics in Africa want their peers to run their small Christian communities.
“A survey we have carried out in the AMECEA region and beyond in Africa has shown that our young people … are no longer comfortable” in small Christian communities run by adult Catholics, he told Catholic News Service Sept. 17. “They are today calling for the formation of their own” communities.
Father Emmanuel Chimombo of Malawi, AMECEA pastoral coordinator, told CNS Sept. 18 that the 12 bishops at the Nairobi meeting also discussed integral education and formation in Catholic institutions, the digital world and its impact on young people, and situations of war, violence and young migrants.
The meeting also addressed uncertainty, hope, fear and unemployment, enjoyment of the liturgy and the vocational status of single persons with no particular consecration, he said.
The bishops considered these and other topics after they had deliberated extensively on the synod’s “instrumentum laboris” (“working document”), Father Chimombo said.
Cardinal John Njue of Nairobi, Ethiopian Catholic Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel, Archbishop Tarcisius Ziyaye of Lilongwe, Malawi, and Archbishop Anthony Muheria of Nyeri, Kenya, are among the delegates from the East African region who will attend the synod.
The AMECEA meeting took place with financial support from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.