CRC General Assembly Highlights

May 28, 2012: Conclusion of the General Assembly. The CRC General Assembly concludes with reports from the thematic workshops and with proposed future orientations and challenges for the Canadian Religious Conference. It will be up to the new CRC Administrative Council to prioritize the orientations in order to establish the action plan for the next two years.

May 27, 2012: The second part of the General Assembly today focused on imagining what might be the future of religious life in Canada and the future direction of the Canadian Religious Conference.  On this Pentecost Sunday, speaker Gilles Routhier recalled that the Apostles could not have imagined what was to happen. They were led out of the Upper Room empowered by the Spirit so as to encounter others, and in this encounter, something totally new took place. The experience of Pentecost led to a reversal of their situation into a dynamic trransformation. Today, in our time, religious are also being led  to encounter others.  It is one of the conditions from which emerges the imaginable.

The business portionof the General Assembly opened with CRC President Mary Finlayson, RSCJ, delivering the Presiden's Report followed by the 2010-2012 Activities Report. A new executive was elected with a two-year mandate.  It is made up of: Michel Proulx, O.PRAEM, President; Annette Noël, SP, Vice-presdient; and George T. Smith, CSB, Secretary-Treasurer.  This was followed by the election of the other members of the Administrative Council:  Anne Lewans, OSU, Rosemary MacDonald, CSM, Pierre Anne Mandato, SCSM, Peter Novecosky, OSB, Alain Rodrigue, CMM,and  Elisabeth Villemure, SMNDA. The day ended with a Eucharistic Celebration, followed by a banquet.

May 26, 2012: Keynote address by Patricia Wittberg, Sister of Charity of Cincinnati, Ohio, and sociology professor at  Indiana Univeristy-Perdue University in Indianapolis.

Patricia Wittberg, SC, began her presentation by describing the diverse generations that coexist today in North America, what sets them apart and their differences. Younger generations do not remember the key events that so deeply formed their elders: World War II, the pre-Vatican II Church, the Quiet Revolution. In this context, each generation may have different spiritual hungers and different secular preoccupations, which those older or younger may not understand. Taking this into account, Sister Patricia then explored the implications of these cultural differrences for both religious life and the Church as a whole.  The more religious are able to truly see  and know what time it is, the more they will be called on to imagine and create new forms of religious life that will speak the Word of Life to it.

Download Patricia Wittberg's presentation:
Recognizing the Time We Inhabit; Bibliography; Questions for discussion

May 25,  2012: Keynote address by Gilles Routhier, priest of the Archdiocese of Quebec and professor at Laval University

Gilles Routhier provided many keys to better understand the Second Vatican Council and what it can still be for the Church today. The origins of the Council were influenced by John XXIII's intuition that an era of human history was coming to an end and we were on ther threshold of something new. It is in this context that the Council was convened with the goal of renewing the way the gospel is proclaimed. To recognize and understand the world in which we live in, its expectations, its longings, and to discern its deep quests and questions remains our challenge  today, as in the time of the Council.