I wanted to call this post "The Session's Serious Stuff," but didn't like the ambiguity of the apostrophe!The "serious" stuff is, of course, the set of talks. The Faith Movement is noted for its intellectually challenging approach, and it can be a bit overwhelming. The speakers are all terribly well-qualified, but then, so are a great many of the audience, which makes the task of giving a talk rather daunting, as Bishop O'Donoghue admitted to me... just looking at the priests, we have degrees in Mathematics, Radio Astronomy, Nuclear Chemistry, Psychology...
However, the speakers are pretty good at making the complicated stuff accessible to the young people present, and they respond to the intellectual challenge. Several times over the years, young people have told me that, while the first Conference they attended was pretty daunting, and some of the content of the talks was tricky to grasp, they recognised that the message being presented to them was one worth making the effort to understand, and that the truths of the Catholic faith were (often for the first time in their lives) being presented in their fullness, without being watered down to make them more "palatable" or "relevant".
The website is down as I type this, but the talks will be available for download quite soon, I think.
The talks were as follows:
Fr. Luiz Ruscillo: The Kingdom of God in the world today
Fr. Stephen Dingley: The future of the world - the meaning and purpose of creation.
Fr. Dylan James: The disaster of sin.
Fr. Roger Nesbitt: "The Kingdom of God is at hand" - The meaning of the first coming of Christ.
Rev. Ross Campbell: "Amen, come Lord Jesus" - the Church prepares for the second coming of Christ.
There was also the talk by our Guest Speaker, Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue, and a Seminar with personal testimonies from Fr. James Clark and two young people whose full names I didn't quite catch (as I thought they'd be on the programme) but who were introduced as Camille and Kieron. I am open to corrections on that!
No comments:
Post a Comment