Held in Denver late last month, the aim was to brainstorm and swap ideas about improving parish life, the Catholic News Agency reported.

The newly-founded Amazing Parish movement seeks to provide a one-stop shop for resources to pastors and parish leaders so they can create a thriving parish life.

The conference featured Catholic speakers and workshops on topics such as parish leadership teams, formation programmes and evangelisation.

Many of the speakers were Catholics serving in leadership roles for big companies, who are adapting tricks of the trade of company leadership to practical ideas for parish leadership.

"The Church is larger than maybe any company that these kind of guys work with, so we have to be strategic," said Amazing Parish staff member Chris Stefanick.

"We have to have the best practices and good team building skills and so I think what we're given is really unique here and it's been received really well."

Mr Stefanick is also a social media evangelist at reallifecatholic.com and helped host the conference, which filled to its 500-person capacity before it was even officially advertised.

"Both that and how it's been received, it just confirms that it's meeting a very huge need in the Church," he said.

For Mr Stefanick, the biggest hope he had for the parishes who attended was that they come away with clarity of both vision and practice.

He called for reduced complexity and a focus on what parishes can do well with what they have.

Everyone at the conference received a binder with guiding questions and planning sheets for each of the seven foundational parts needed to create an amazing parish.

These are made up for three foundational traits: a reliance on prayer, a real leadership team, and a clear vision, as well as four other traits, which are the Sunday experience, compelling formation, small group discipleship and missionary zeal.

During the conference, parish representatives were encouraged to focus on those things that made their parishes unique and how they could work with those characteristics.

Tim Weiske, a parishioner at St Clements in Chicago, said he thought a good goal to focus on for their parish was forming their large young adult population.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Amazing Parish
• National Catholic Register
• Image: Catholic News Agency

These are among the resources Caritas has created for the annual Social Justice Week, which runs from September 14-20 this year.

The campaign focuses on Catholic social teaching and the Church's tradition of justice.

One of the videos shows the joint work in Rotorua of St Vincent de Paul, St Michael's parish and John Paul College, which run the Full Fill community van taking food to vulnerable communities.

"Our hope is that this focus during Social Justice Week will lead to a renewed understanding and commitment to the ways in which each of us can put Catholic social teaching into practice, in our homes, families and communities," said Caritas director Julianne Hickey.

This year, the New Zealand General Election falls on the last day of Social Justice Week.

Rather than telling New Zealanders how to vote in the election, the Social Justice Week materials aim to inspire Catholics and the wider community to consider what ethical principles underlie responses to economic and social issues.

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The letter was issued by the Symposium of Catholic Bishops' Conferences in Africa and Madagascar (SECAM). It was signed by SECAM'S president Cardinal Polycarp Pengo, Archbishop of Dar-es-Salaam.

The letter, addressed to "all people of good will", said the Church is attentive to everything that affects the day-to-day political, economic and social lives of her people.

During the democratic transitional period of the 1990s, the Church played a clearly visible role, the letter said. Five out of the eight national transitional conferences that were organised during this epoch were chaired by Catholic bishops.

Fifty years after independence, many African economies remain weak, the bishops said.

"Africa remains a prey of foreign multinational companies. They continue to plunder the continent of its resources; in some cases they even evade the tax system both in African countries and in their own countries of origin by putting away the revenues of their activities in fiscal havens, thus depriving local communities of resources they are entitled to….

"The development of our countries is strongly mortgaged by corruption. Corruption has become a cancer in almost all the African countries and affects vital sectors such as the economic system, day to day administration, the job market, health, education, and the judicial system.

"We are aware that many governments are conscious of this problem and are making efforts to combat it. Unfortunately, personal interest and the frantic quest for gains have become stronger than the sense of the common good."

Among their suggestions, the bishops said: "Perhaps time has now come for Africa to strive to invent models of government that really respond to our needs and fit our contexts, inspired by the wisdom of African traditional governance systems and structures."

Sources:

Zenit

Fides (Text of pastoral letter)

Image: The White House