Guayaquil, Ecuador, Dec 5, 2009 / 22:04 pm
Cardinal Estanislao Karlic, Archbishop Emeritus of Parana, Argentina, encouraged the participants of 3rd Plenary Assembly of the Christian Life Movement to be true missionaries of Christ by always resorting to prayer and the Eucharist.
On the second day of the assembly, which runs December 1-8, Cardinal Karlic delivered the keynoted address on the theme, “The spiritual life as the foundation of apostolic fruitfulness.”
“We are all elected by God for a mission,” he said, and we must become “other Christs in order act as missionaries of Christ.”
“How do we live this missionary mystery? We must discover ourselves in this mystery, believe it, celebrate it, live it and pray it,” he explained.
The cardinal noted that in order to celebrate and communicate the mystery, one must first live the experience of “being given by God in order to later give Him away.” God “comes to us and when He makes His dwelling in us, his temple, then we are able to communicate Him” to others.
“The encounter between men must be an encounter of mutually communicating God to one another. That is friendship; it’s not only giving things or giving one’s self, its giving God,” he added.
Cardinal Karlic recalled that prayer “implies friendship as well as intimate and frequent dialogue with the One who is loved.” In this way one learns to dialogue with God in order to learn how to convey Him in the apostolate to others, said the cardinal.
He added that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, from which everything flows and towards which everything leads.