Honduran Bishops Conference, February 2010

ORDINARY MEETING OF THE HONDURAS BISHOPS CONFERENCE

“Live praying and supplicating. Pray at all times as the Spirit inspires you. Watch together and persevere in your praying without ever being disheartened, interceding for the holy ones, your brothers [and sisters].” (Ephesians 6: 18)

February 9 to 12 we held the first ordinary meeting of the Honduras Bishops Conference for the current year, 2010.

Together we have given thanks to God for the devotion to Mary shared with the People of God and shown on the feast of Our Lady, the Virgin of Suyapa, the Patron of Honduras.

We have also given thanks for the tenderness of God toward those who are sick as we commemorate the Virgin Mary under the advocacy of Our Lady of Lourdes, during the 18th World Day of the Sick.

We shared with the representatives of ADVENIAT their interest in the Delegates of the Word of God, while thanking them for the generous aid that this institution of the German Catholic Church offers to the Church in Honduras so that we can provide better fruits in our task of evangelizing.

In an atmosphere of prayer and communion we examined the prophetic and evangelizing attitude which the Catholic Church ought to have in the face of the political, economic, and social reality which our country is living at this time when a new stage of its history is beginning with a new government.

Consistent with our faith we consider it a moral today that all of us believers commit ourselves according to our vocation and personal status to participate in the democratic life which the people of Honduras has chosen; and that we work as instruments of the reconciliation which we urgently need in all areas of our social life together.

As citizens we ought to know how to demand of the new authorities, within legal channels, action which is transparent and base on the principle of Social Justice which the Social Doctrine of the Church insists in all its teachings. We ought to demand a just and preferential attention to the poor who are the majority of our people so that all that is promised is fulfilled.

We bishops have discerned that the Catholic Church can and ought to face the difficult realities which are perpetuated beyond [the scope of] the governments which steer our path and which sometimes become much more acute because of their inability [to respond to them]. We are thinking about the increasing action and power of drug traffickers and organized crime, the corruption which is so difficult to eradicate, the considerable fiscal deficit, the legislative delay which permits situations which harm our people, natural resources and the environment.

We the bishops of Honduras commit ourselves to continue working in our respective dioceses together with the priest, religious men and women, missionaries and the faithful to respond to the challenges noted.

We renew the preferential option for the poor. A consequence of this option is the task to reorganize and strengthen the Social Ministry at all levels – national, diocesan, and parish, so that, as the Document of [the Latin American Bishops Conference Meeting at] Aparecida says, it might be “structured, organic and integral that with projects of assistance [and] human promotion, if might make itself present in the new realities of exclusion and marginalization which the most vulnerable groups live, where life is most threatened” (Document of Aparecida, #401)

Seeing that we are approaching the season of Lent, we exhort all the faithful to initiate a path of conversion which permits us to recognize our weaknesses and limitations in order to make reconciliation possible within the heart of the Church and society; a way of grace that allows us to discover the Love of Christ which becomes the way to lead us to glory going through the cross. To live Lent definitively, as a privileged time which brings us to the joy of the Pasch/Passover of the Lord, whose joy no one can take away from us (cf. Juan 16:22).

Honduran Bishops Conference