On Sunday, October 30^th, a meeting of lay and religious Assumptionists took place in Mexico. hirty-four participants, lay men and women and religious came together from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Spain, the United States and Mexico.

The main goal of the meeting was summarized in the following terms: “With the decisions of the 2011 General Chapter regarding the Lay-Religious Alliance as our starting point, we would like to provide guidelines appropriate for our Latin-American context that would help us to become men and women of faith and communion, in solidarity with the poor”.

By abp. Charles J. Chaput

My theme focuses on Catholics and the American future. But sometimes the best way to look at the future is through the lens of the past.

One of the most sacred symbols of the Roman state was an altar to the goddess Victory. It stood in the Roman Senate for nearly 400 years. In a.d. 382, a Christian emperor removed the altar as idolatrous. Two years later, after his death, the pagan prefect of Rome—Quintus Aurelius Symmachus—wrote one of the most interesting letters of Late Antiquity. Addressing the new Christian emperor, Symmachus asked that the Altar of Victory be restored.

On Saturday, October 8, 2011, Most Rev. Gonzalo Gracía de Cortázar, bishop of Valparaíso, celebrated Mass in the parish church of Our Lady of Lourdes founded by the Assumptionists in 1911.

The Assumptionists arrived in this port city in February 1911, led by Fr. Gunfrid Darbois (brother of the first president of Assumption College, Fr. Thomas Darbois), and settled into the neighborhood known as Cerro de los Placeres which, at the time, had a small population  that had just begun to return because of the huge earthquake that occurred in 1906.

As it is every year, the feast of our three Assumptionist  Bulgarian martyrs is an opportunity to stop to reflect on the heritage that they have left not only to us who are called to work today in the Mission in Eastern Europe, but to every brother and sister of our Assumption Family and the Church at large.

Keeping alive their memory means rendering present among us these brothers whom the Church, by means of their beatification, considers to be a gift for all of Christianity. Praying to them, invoking their intercession, allows us to receive the spiritual support we need to make Christ alive in us and around us.