Thursday 24 December 2009

A CASE to be answered?

It is being reported  that the Catholic Agency to Support Evangelisation  (CASE) is to be closed. [Hmmm... should I have put that link in, or will it disappear soon?]

Through my work at Maryale Institute, I have met Clare Ford, one of the CASE team members; and, in a rather earlier existence, I had also met Mgr Keith Barltrop. What I know of them, and of their work, I regard highly. Mgr Barltrop was the lead organiser for the recent visit of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux - one of the most powerfully evangelising moments in our country for many a year.

Like others, I believe that CASE was one of the most valuable initiatives to emerge from the Catholic Bishops' Conference in recent years. And the key to its being so valuable was the people and not the structure; and no accident that team members have previous experience in the context of the new movements.

I find it quite incomprehensible that it should be being abandoned. Especially when CYMFed is being created, with rather less of a pedigree in the field of evangelisation, and without articulating in its aims any explicit reference to evangelisation. An agency which works with genuine sense of charism is being ditched; and a structure which does not claim any charism is being established.

I hope that those who have worked in CASE in recent years are able to find ways to continue the contribution that they have been making to evangelisation.

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