Rome (Italy). On 6 February 2024, the School Representatives of the CIME Conference of Europe and the Middle East met in an online meeting with the aim of identifying future prospects for the group of CIME Schools and for the possible establishment of a CIME FMA Schools Commission.
Present at the meeting were 19 representatives of the Schools, Sister Runita Borja, General Councilor for Youth Ministry of the FMA Institute, and Sister Chanda Nsofwa, CIME School Representative for the YM Sector.
At the opening, Sister Runita greeted the participants, underlining how the Church in recent years has highlighted synodality as a constitutive dimension. In this line, the FMA Institute, in the reflection of the XXIV General Chapter, highlighted missionary synodality as a lifestyle that generates new ways of participation, animation, and government. This becomes an invitation to be inspired by the community of “Mornese in outreach” in communion with the synodal ecclesial path, taking on the responsibility of living synodality to bear witness to the prophecy of communion, growing in co-responsibility, subsidiarity, and planning mentality.
To help find some path forward together as FMA CIME Schools, Sister Runita also recalled the Acts of General Chapter XXIV (n° 33):
“We are convinced that adopting the Global Educational Pact from the perspective of integral ecology is today a possibility for a new humanism. It’s about networking, in a broad educational alliance, to develop universal solidarity.”
Along these lines, she also indicated the YM Series no. 20 entitled “Let’s build the Global Educational Pact from the perspective of the Preventive System”, which the Youth Ministry Sector sent to the Provinces in January 2024. From this, we can see how the Global Educational Pact is a call to revive the way of interpreting and making concrete the Salesian educational charism in the current time.
Starting from the objective of the meeting, to identify future prospects for the group of CIME Schools for the possible establishment of an FMA Schools Commission in CIME, the Representatives then did some brainstorming.
Significant was the convergence on the need to strengthen the CIME school network, as a space to: reinforce ourselves in the common Salesian identity; enhance the educational tradition; highlight the beauty of the mission; socialize experiences and good practices; share educational reflections underway in different contexts; draw up guidelines of educational action starting from the concrete reality of today’s young people; identify together creative responses to today’s educational challenges; give visibility to the FMA Schools as an active voice in Europe and in the Church; create interactions and collaborations with European Institutions; support Catholic schools.
According to the indications that have emerged, the Commission will have to be established following precise criteria of geographical representativeness and skills. The journey therefore continues in the commitment to take care of and accompany the new generations by networking to respond to the educational appeals of the different contexts in which the FMA are called to work.
