Ascension Thursday 1998

Ascension Thursday 1998

To the members of the worldwide Vincentian Family

My very dear Brothers and Sisters,

May the grace of Our Lord be always with you!

This year, as we approach the Third Millennium, the Church calls us to focus in a special way on the Holy Spirit. We will soon be celebrating Pentecost, so I am appealing today to the many members of our worldwide family to join with me in asking the Spirit to come upon us Vincentians as we prepare for our General Assembly, which will meet in Rome from July 6-31.

The theme of this Assembly is, as many of you already know, "The Worldwide Vincentian Family and the Challenges of the Mission in the Third Millennium." We want to make this an Assembly in which we talk not just about our family, but also with representatives from its various branches. To that end, we have invited a number of representatives from our family to join us from July 9-14 to express their hopes, their needs, and practical suggestions that will help us toward richer collaboration in the future. As we prepare, we have already received many suggestions about cooperation in formation programs, common prayer, apostolic ministries, and various short-range and long-range projects with and for the poor.

I hope that the Assembly will be a time when the Spirit fills our hearts and gives us "a sense of the true and a taste for the good." So the purpose of this letter is very simple: I ask you to pray with us during these days. I know I can count on that.

There will be a page on Internet giving frequent, even daily, news bulletins about the Assembly. Its address is: http://www.famvin.org. I trust that you will find the page very informative and that it will also be a reminder to continue to accompany us in your prayer.

Your brother in St. Vincent,

Robert P. Maloney, C.M.

Superior General

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