Bengaluru: The Church in India has taken the initiative to bring the teachings of the papal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) to people at grassroots.
A major step toward this was the publication of the Hindi translation of the exhortation by the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), the national body of Latin rite bishops in the country.
The translation will help Catholics in northern India where Hindi is the mother tongue to understand the Church’s latest teachings.
Cardinal Oswald Gracias, who is president of CCBI as well as the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), released the translation at a function in Bengaluru on September 28. He gave the first copy to Archbishop Anil Couto of Delhi.
CCBI’s Family Commission takes special interest to popularize the exhortation’s teachings. The CCBI secretariat claims the exhortation was widely discussed at national, regional and diocesan levels in India.
The conference “is committed to strengthening family life, despite the many challenges it faces,” says a September 29 press release.
The exhortation, released on April 8, is the fruit of two synod of bishops on family in 2014 and 2015 in Rome.
The press release says FABC’s eleventh plenary assembly scheduled for November 28 to December 4 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, will address the theme, “The Catholic Family: Domestic Church of the Poor and Mission of Mercy.”
The next CCBI plenary assembly of, scheduled for January 31 to February 8, 2017 at Bhopal, central India, will also discuss the theme “The Joy of Love in the Family: Amoris Laetitia and its Implications for India.”
Through these episcopal assemblies the Church in India plans a renewal in the family ministry at the diocesan, regional and national levels, the press statement said.
CCBI, the canonical national episcopal conference in India, is the largest bishops’ conference in Asia and the fourth largest in the world. There are 132 dioceses and 181 bishops in the Latin Church in India.