The online participants have to be appreciated for their presence, with particular mention of the Superiors of PGS (Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands) and THA (Thailand and Cambodia), who braved the wee hours of the night in their parts of the world to participate in the dialogue sessions with the community and formation team.
The curatorium found a basically healthy and joyful Salesian community of 38 student confreres and 9 team members, besides some 17 extern students in the Studium Theologicum Salesianum (STS) and a significant number of teachers drawn from the city of Jerusalem.
This year the community has confreres from 25 provinces and 23 nations. All of them were able to enter Israel despite Covid strictures, though some of the new students lost a few months of the first semester. In contrast to the summer of 2020 when many of the formation team and students stayed on in the Holy Land, in 2021 most confreres were able to do summer ministries at home, in Italy or elsewhere.
One of the chief topics of discussion in the curatorium was interculturality: How do we live together as Salesians coming from such different backgrounds and cultures? How do we distinguish what is essential to faith and charism, what can be lived in different ways, and what is entirely unacceptable, regardless of where we come from? We reminded ourselves that we have the great way of dialogue, which becomes discernment when done in a spirit of prayerful listening to the Lord. In this context, it was good to hear that our Jerusalem community and the STS are deeply involved in diocesan level initiatives, with the active encouragement of His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. On 1 March 2022, STS will organize a symposium involving all the studentates and Catholic theological centres in the Holy Land, in what hopefully will be a new path of collaboration and interaction between these realities in the Land of Jesus.
The Jerusalem curatorium meets once a year for a day and a half. This year was the first time that the meeting was held in “mixed mode,” which we intend offering also in the coming years. But the great wish is: “next year in Jerusalem!”