Journeying Synodally, Sharing the Fruits of the 2025 Interchapter

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Journeying Synodally, Sharing the Fruits of the 2025 Interchapter

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Rome, October 19, 2025

Anniversary of the Beatification of Eugene de Mazenod

At the beginning of this message, I would like to extend my greetings, wishing peace and joy and renewed hope to each and every Oblate and all those who feel part of our charismatic family.

At the beginning of October, we celebrated the Jubilee of Missionaries and the Jubilee of Consecrated Life in Rome. This helped us renew ourselves in two dimensions that define our identity as a charismatic family that joyfully lives the Gospel and proclaims it to the poorest. A few weeks earlier, in August, we held the Interchapter session in Bangalore, India. All these events are a message of hope for us. The letter I address to you today aims to share the Intercapitular experience with all of you and at the same time invite you to continue our pilgrimage of hope in communion with renewed enthusiasm.

  1. The Interchapter, an experience of joy in the Spirit.

At the end of our Interchapter session, many of the participants wondered how they could share what they had experienced in their respective Oblate Units. It is not easy for us to share the experiences in which we have felt the presence of God. Today we want to share with joy and humility that the Interchapter was for us, above all, an experience of Oblate fraternity and joy in the Holy Spirit.

The Interchapter session adopted the dynamic of spiritual conversations used in the sessions of the Synod on Synodality of the Catholic Church. After praying with the Scriptures and the CC&RR, we all had the opportunity to express our opinions on equal terms about the proposed topics, which were in turn the fruit of a previous synodal journey. We all listened attentively and prayerfully to what each person shared. We all tried to free ourselves from anything that could condition our hearts from the necessary acceptance of the promptings of the Holy Spirit. The Interchapter was an experience of communal discernment based on prayerful listening to the Word of God, to the reality of our world and of the Congregation, listening to each of the participants, and to the inspirations of the Spirit.

Certainly, this process of discernment required a persevering effort. We experience our great diversity as a gift of the Spirit that is also a task to harmonize our differences in charismatic communion. We can say that the Interchapter has produced in us a feeling of surprise: the surprise of perceiving God guiding us and helping us overcome our difficulties, the surprise of joyfully experiencing that we are a single family striving to live the ideal proposed by its Founder: one heart, one soul.

  1. Sharing the Interchapter documents.

Thanks to the work of the Interchapter facilitators, we have reliable documentation of what was heard at the assembly. We now wish to share with you the documents that reflect the essential consensus reached. We believe this can help us continue to implement the last General Chapter of 2022. We are also aware that we will be able to implement some proposals and recommendations in the coming years, while others will need to be prepared for the corresponding decisions at the Chapter of 2028.

Although the Interchapter has no decision-making power, it does have a certain authority, as it expresses the consensus of all the major superiors, along with the Central Government of our Congregation. Therefore, we invite you to accept these documents with a spirit of discernment and also, if you will allow us, as a call to personal and communal conversion. We believe that, viewed from this perspective, these documents can serve as a roadmap for our local communities, as well as for our Units and Regions, and for the Congregation as a whole.

The main document we are sharing today follows the same order in which the topics were addressed in the Interchapter discernment: Constitutions and Rules; Laity; Laudato Si’; Ongoing Formation; Solidarity and Collaboration; Financial Responsibility; Formation and Interculturality; Formation of Formators; Consolidation of Formation Houses; Restructuring of Units and Regions; Restructuring of Government within the Congregation. Along with this document, we are also sharing the Reports prepared by the Central Government, which are the fruit of the synodal discernment undertaken by the entire Congregation over the past three years.

Please follow this link to access the documents: Interchapter Documents

3. And now what? Living the Jubilee and the Bicentennial with hope.

As we celebrate the Jubilee of Hope with the Catholic Church, we are called to renew ourselves in our baptismal life and in the common call to holiness together with all the People of God. As a charismatic family, we also embrace the call to renew ourselves in our specific vocation to participate in God’s mission as cooperators with Jesus Christ. We do this guided by our Constitutions and Rules as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of our pontifical approval. Saint Eugene never tired of repeatedly urging his Oblates to embrace the Rules in order to be faithful to our vocation and be holy missionaries of the poor in community.

As a Central Government, we dream that the entire charismatic family can live an experience similar to that experienced at the Interchapter. We dream that every local community, every Unit, every Region can launch processes of communal discernment in which all are heard with a prayerful attitude and on equal terms, processes in which the Holy Spirit and the Word of God are heard. How wonderful it would be to read and pray in community some or all of these documents we share today! How beautiful it would be to do so with other members of the charismatic family wherever possible! How beautiful it would be to do so, always thinking about how to better serve the poor so that they can proclaim the Good News with us!

In the September-October 2025 plenary session, we continued our discernment to try to prioritize the actions we should implement in the next three years. We also began to discuss possible animation tools to prepare for the next General Chapter. As the Central Government, we wish to commit to continuing our synodal journey, discerning together and making decisions that will allow us to continue moving forward. Therefore, it will not be unusual for us to contact the individuals or Units involved in one or the other process proposed by the Interchapter. We invite you all to participate and pray that these discernment processes will help us continue our journey.

At the dawn of the 200th anniversary of the pontifical approval of the Congregation and the approval of our CC&RR, I renew the invitation I made in my letter of February 17, 2025:

  • That all members of the charismatic family, during this Holy Jubilee Year, evaluate their response in following Christ by reading, praying, and living the CC&RR.
  • That each local Oblate community propose community gatherings and celebrations to read, pray, and live the CC&RR together. Monthly retreats could be favorable moments. In some places, this could be done together with other members of the charismatic family.
  • That each Oblate Unit organize ongoing formation and annual retreats for 2025 and 2026 based on the CC&RR.
  • That the Oblates in each institution or ministry in which they serve (parishes, shrines, schools, universities, JPIC offices, spirituality centers, etc.) propose at least one public event to present the Oblate charism from the CC&RR to society and the local Church.
  • That each Unit schedule a celebration or celebrations of thanksgiving for our papal approval in 2026. We are working globally to hold an audience with the Pope, about which we will be able to provide more details soon.

Let us continue our pilgrimage of hope with renewed enthusiasm. Let us celebrate our bicentennial, open to God’s surprises. The Holy Spirit is urging us to renew ourselves in our vocation so that we may better serve the poor by announcing the Good News to them.

On this anniversary of the beatification of Eugene de Mazenod, we wish to ask for his special intercession so that this new stage in our religious family may enable us to continue our journey as pilgrims of hope in communion. May Mary Immaculate, our Mother, continue to accompany us and illuminate our pilgrimage of hope with her witness and protection. May Saint Eugene and all the Blessed Oblates inspire us to have the courage to attempt everything to open the new paths that charity inspires in us to joyfully proclaim the Gospel to the most abandoned.

Your brother, pilgrim of hope in communion.

Luis Ignacio ROIS ALONSO, OMI
Superior General

Published on the OMI World website