Day Three: September 13th, 2014
13/09/2014 21:04
The first couple days in Assisi the weather has been unseasonable cool and cloudy, but today things started to warm up, both outside the Domus Pacis and inside.
In today's sessions two important tasks were completed. First, the regional reports have been read and commented upon, and secondly, a decision was made about the power and mandate of the commissions treating individual houses.
The purpose of the regional reports is to summarize the observations about general situations in each of the thirteen regions of our Order. This year the reports were characterized by a touching honesty and transparency, particularly about the difficulties regions are experiencing. Some regions are more closely tied together in terms of language, culture and the distances between them, and therefore present a more cohesive picture.
Others are more disparate and have a broader set of situations to articulate. In a panoramic sense, the capitulants are now aware and better educated about what is happening in our Cistercian world.
The main work of the General Chapter is the discussion of each community's house report. This work is divided up between fourteen small commissions, each consisting of about fifteen people. In the past the question has been raised about what powers the commissions have in order to put into practice the conclusions they arrive at. For the majority of houses, a consensus can be reached between the commission, the superior of the house and the father immediate. For a small number of houses where consensus cannot be reached, the house report goes to the whole General Chapter, which is where the authority of the Order lies.
The completion of both of these tasks have prepared the way for the main of the General Chapter to commence.
The sessions today culminated in a presentation from the central secretary of formation, Dom Santiago of the Generalate. In his talk Dom Santiago asked the question, how do we know when a person is well formed in Cistercian life? The answer is that the person has three good
relationships: the relationship with oneself, the relationship with others, and the relationship with Christ, who is our center of gravity. "We can have difficulties as big as a cathedral," Dom Santiago emphatically stated, "but we have to know how to seek for our center of gravity, which is Christ."
This was a good note to end with, and to begin our celebration of the Feast of the Holy Cross.
Note: the picture was taken at an outdoor chapel behind the Domus Pacis by one of the US regional delegates.
Tercer día 13 de septiembre 2014.pdf (45815)