URBI ET ORBI?
Dominican Preaching – stress testing in a post-Christian Europe
Cologne, Germany, September 28 – October 1, 2022
Is our preaching still relevant for today’s Europe?
We read the following insights of Theologian Christoph Theobald SJ:
“However, the proclamation of the Gospel today is addressed to people who have largely renounced any interest in global visions. They live with fragmentary images of the world and in many cases also understand their own life story as a sequence of provisional fragments. This is precisely the problem for faith. In this situation, our rather “objectivistic” and internal church-formed proclamation has a hard time making its credibility plausible.
(Christoph Theobald, Christentum als Stil. Für ein zeitgemäßes Glaubensverständnis in Europa (Christianity as a Style. For a Contemporary Understanding of Faith in Europe), Freiburg 2018, p.24+33).
It is now up to our churches to ask the question whether the Christian Catholic understanding of faith in its mediating instances has not given itself a rather strategic-purposeful form in the last decades, which has distanced it more and more from the concrete everyday life of the people.”
His thoughts challenge and encourage us to reflect on the question what it means to be a Dominican Preacher in Europe today. Where and how do we meet people – Christians and not-baptised people? Do we have experiences and questions in common? How is the Catholic Church recognized and accepted in the different countries in Europe?
We would like to work with the participants on these and a lot more questions at our Colloquium 2022.
Conference Language: English (no translation into other languages)
Program Highlights
Keynotes
Fr. Alain Arnould O.P. (Socius of the Master of the Order for Western-Europe and Canada)
Sr. Margaret Mayce O.P. (Coordinator Dominican Sisters International Confederation)
Workshops
with participants from different European countries and from all branches of the Dominican Family
Pray & Preach
Daily liturgy with short homilies
Eucharist at the tomb of St. Albert the Great
Community
with about 50 brothers and sisters from whole Europe
Get together, Praying, Sightseeing