The SMA-OLA hermeneutic seminar ended on the feast day of the Apostles Saint James, the birthday of Father Augustine Planque, SMA and Founder of the NDA Sisters. It is quite a symbol that stands on this day, where the participants continued and completed the work on hermeneutics.
The day was marked by the closing mass presided over by His Excellency Mgr. Roger Houngbedji, Archbishop of Cotonou, in the presence of Mgr. François Gnonhossou, Bishop of Dassa-Zoumé, the Superiors of the SMA Provinces of Benin and Togo: Fr Désiré Salako and Fr Fabien Sognon.
In his homily, the Dominican Archbishop first praised the entire process of SMA-OLA "En route vers 2026". He said, among other things: "I salute your journey which seems to me to be indispensable, fundamental for every congregation. We still need to understand more deeply what the first intuition of our founders was, we need to rediscover it, to better appropriate it and see how we can put it into practice to better respond to the challenges of our time."
Speaking about the texts of the day, he asked the assembly to always remember that "the work we are associated to is not our own", and that, "We must always recognize that we are dependent on the first missionary who is Christ". It is He who calls us in our fragility and "without Him we cannot go further in this work". It is necessary to recall that our mission consists in "communicating the life of Christ to others", through all the experiences that we live. Finally, he insisted that "mission is fundamentally service to others", following the example of Christ who came to serve and not to be served, and to give his life as a ransom for others. He reminded everyone how this spirit of service in following Christ was alive in our founders.
The process "En route vers 2026" allows us to immerse ourselves in this spirit of service of our founders. They embraced human frailty to allow the glory of God to make its way from their lives to us. An important stage of this process is now over, and what remains, is to internalize the graces received in order to prepare for the fourth phase: The actualization.
Pierre-Paul DOSSEKPLI
