Bishop García Cadiñanos closes the Spanish Week of Missiology: “We must cultivate spirituality”

The Spanish Week of Missiologyheld in Burgos since Monday, has closed with the intervention of the Burgos Fernando Garcia Cadinanos, Bishop of Mondoñedo-Ferrol, who has lectured on “Social friendship and social boundaries”. The prelate has shown how the insistence of the Pope Francisco on the “fraternity and social friendship” are the best expression forbreak so many circles that make it impossible to meet and, therefore, witness and announce”.



García Cadiñanos has underlined that friendship achieves in “love with someone”in cultivating the we for “be passionately interested in the same things”. We live in a society with a culture marked by individualism. This sign of identity has the risk of vicious circle of endless confrontation. The Gospel has a marked community character. Therefore, the commitment to the common good may be the best antidote to the vicious circle. For this, the bishop of Mondoñedo-Ferrol has suggested, it is necessary to “approach reality, not presuppose it; convert thought and cultivate spirituality. If we are all in the same boat, reality has to overcome the idea and has to uninstall us. For this, it is urgent to touch the flesh, that is, the pain and suffering of the brothers”. quoting Fratelli Tutti, “it must be done from below, one by one. It is what we know as political charity”, she concluded.

The mission, deep identity

For her part, the lay missionary Rose OrtegaStephen has been in charge of concluding the Week with a paper to open the horizon: “The Mission is here?” The Burgos woman has insisted that the mission is always for life. The mission is an identity, not a place. “Of my 40 years as a missionary, I have only been in Africa for 9. The rest has been in Europe. I am a missionary. The mission is not a profession or an activity, it is my profound identity. I like to repeat with the Pope: I am a mission on this earth”. On the other hand, she has recognized that in Spain we live in a privileged time. We are called to help our Christian communities to move from a sociological faith to a faith that is the fruit of the personal experience of encountering the Lord.

It has also recognized the importance of approaching young people and adolescents,not only because they are the future, but because they are a true mission field. They live a deep interior loneliness and have a great need to be listened to, welcomed, accompanied and endured. The mission among them has the name of patience, gratuitousness and waiting in the Spirit”.



Yesterday’s event featured the Secretary General of the Pontifical Missionary Union, the Vietnamese Franciscan P. Dinh Anh Nhue Nguyen. His presentation dealt with the Pontifical Mission Societies and its action throughout the world. He initially recalled that in his Christian faith “there is something Spanish.” His grandmother lived in the lands evangelized by the Basque Dominican Saint Valentin Berriochoa, martyred in 1864 in the former French Indochina, now Vietnam. He highlighted the nature and purpose of the PMOs initiated by Pauline Jaricot 200 years ago in Lyon. This French laywoman saw the need for prayer and collection to help evangelization in the most remote places. It is a question of a charismatic origin that will be ratified later with the motto ‘mon clotre c’est tout le mond’. Jaricot was a woman attentive to change, open to the world and concerned about spreading the Gospel throughout the world. After the conference of the Franciscan priest, Maria del Mar Cugat (Tarragona) and Montserrat Prada (Zamora) highlighted missionary animation in their dioceses. The afternoon continued with testimonies of missionary animation from PMS Spain and from the Missionaries of Jesus in Pamplona.

Bishop García Cadiñanos closes the Spanish Week of Missiology: “We must cultivate spirituality”