Vatican gives nod to neocatechumenism

Sydney
7 July 2002

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Vatican gives nod to neocatechumenism

By Marilyn Kerjean and CNS

The Vatican’s approval of the statute of the Neocatechumenal Way has caused a lot of excitement at St Fiacre’s parish, Leichhardt, says parish priest Fr Gary Devery.

“There have been talks about (official approval) for a few years and it’s exciting that it is finally coming to fruition,” he said.

It is 20 years since St Fiacre’s embraced the Neocatechumenal Way, the Catholic parish-based renewal movement formed in the mid-1960s in Spain.

Rita and Toto Piccolo, the catechists who brought the movement to Australia from Rome 25 years ago, travelled back to Rome for the approval ceremony last week at the offices of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

Cardinal James Francis Stafford, head of the council, presided over the ceremony during which the movement’s international leaders – founders Kiko Argüello and Carmen Hernández and Italian priest Fr Mario Pezzi – were handed the council’s decree of approval.

In his statement announcing the Vatican’s decision, Cardinal Stafford said it was “an event of noteworthy Church significance”.

The movement’s approved norms had the aim of “regulating the practice of the Neocatechumenal Way and its harmonious insertion into the fabric of the Church, also offering an aid to all the pastors of the Church in their fatherly and vigilant accompaniment of the Neocatechumenal communities,” he said.

The approval of the statutes “opens a new stage in the life of the Way, in which the Pontifical Council for the Laity will not fail to accompany it with the same solicitude in the future that it has adopted until now”, he added.

The movement, which has an emphasis on Christian living based on the experience of the early Church communities, has spread to more than 100 nations.

It includes 1500 communities in 800 dioceses, 5000 parishes and 40 diocesan seminaries.

In Australia it has spread to parishes in Melbourne, Darwin, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.

While it had the support of Pope John Paul II it required formal approval of its statutes by the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

The council, in determining its position on the Neocatechumenate movement, consulted individual bishops and bishops’ conferences around the world to evaluate the experience of the Way at parish, diocesan and national levels.

Fr Devery says he has not read the statute yet but that the Vatican’s approval of it will not affect how things work at the parish level.

“It is more (pertinent) on the diocesan level; for the bishops to know the Vatican has gone through a discernment process and embraced it as a Catholic way of formation,” he said.