"New" missions

Today was a great day. We started in the morning by visiting the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization and had a great talk.  The undersecretary did a great job at explaining what exactly the Church is looking for from priest with the New Evangelization, which is great since the New Evangelization can become rather a catch phrase with no meaning.  Basically be filled with the joy of the Gospel at all times (which you can do since it's joy not happiness), conform your liturgy to the mind of the Church, and don't be afraid to equip the laity in their proper charisms.  Not mind blowing, but very solid and much more concrete than I was expecting.

The Pantheon to make up for a lack of pictures.

After a class session which I must confess I dozed through, three of the ASPM men attending the NAC came over for lunch. Then I did some much needed laundry and a holy hour.  The reason that I am mentioning this holy hour when I normally gloss over it along with the rest of my prayer life is that I offered it for the Fire of Hope conference going on in the Twin Cities this weekend.  It's a great ecumenical women's conference organized by one of my teaching parish committee members, so I would ask that you also pray for its success.

In the evening, we visited the Emmanuel School of Mission, which is run by the Emmanuel community and is sort of a cross between NET ministries and St. Thomas' Catholic Studies Rome experience in that they are in Rome taking classes for nine months but they also do outreach, street evangelization, and run retreats all over the world for a little over a month and a half during that period.  We had mass and dinner with them and I am impressed.

Shots of people chatting before dinner.

The dome on the way home.

So the summary of the day is there are lota of great ways in which people are trying to be holy and I am excited to work for the future of the Church.  Tomorrow begins our long weekend so TJ and I are traveling to Florence.  There ought to be wifi, but if for some reason there is not expect a series of posts Monday evening.