Welcome to the fifth 2008 edition of the Communique for the Hamilton, Ontario Diocese Cursillo community. For more information about the Hamilton Diocese Cursillo Movement visit www.4thday.ca.
In this issue:
In case you missed the note sent outon October 23rd here it is again:
The Women's 70th Weekend date is October 30th to November 2nd, 2008- It is being held at Mount Mary in Ancaster, Ontario. The closing will be on Sunday November 2nd at 3:00 p.m. Please consider showing your support to the candidates and team.
If you have a completed application for this weekend please forward as soon as possible directly to Joyce Hause, 43 Crosby Drive, Kitchener, Ontario N2B 2K9.
The Men's 72nd Weekend date is November 13th to November 16th, 1008. It is being held at St. Ignatius Preservation Centre, Deemerton, Ontario. The closing will be on Sunday November 16th at 3:00 p.m. Please show your support also to the candidates and team.
PLEASE NOTE: At this time we do not have many men candidates. We certainly would love to have more attend this weekend. I am asking that you give this some thought and ask the Holy Spirit to direct you to that special person whom you have not contacted.
Take care – Joyce Hause – Weekend Co-ordinator
Click here for an application for the upcoming weekends.
Dear Cursillistas,
I pray that all of you are enjoying God’s beautiful autumn colours. I apologize for not getting to every Ultreya in the past year. This was due to my surgery last November and my recuperation time. I thank all of you for your prayers. I want to bring you up to date on many things that are happening within the Secretariat.
First of all in pre-Cursillo, Rodney Bell is working hard on finding a representative for each parish in our diocese. This person would allow their name to be in their parish bulletin and on Cursillo brochures as the contact person for the parish. If you would like to volunteer for your parish, please contact Rodney Bell at rodney.bell@sympatico.ca or 519-856-4949. Also Rodney is waiting for us to receive the information needed to allow tax receipts for any Cursillo donations. The government promised us this within two weeks so we patiently wait for this to happen. We are still receiving a few donations from Cursillistas to cover the extra costs involved to hold weekends at Mount Mary. We, the Secretariat, would appreciate any financial assistance we can get. Donations can be given to any secretariat member.
With weekends, the women will hold a weekend at Mount Mary in Ancaster on Oct. 30 – Nov. 2nd. Closing time is 3:00 p.m. The men’s weekend is being held in Deemerton on Nov. 13-16th. That closing is also at 3:00 p.m. We are very grateful that Deemerton is again open for business.
In Post Cursillo, our Croatian Ultreya is holding a General Ultreya on Friday, Nov. 21st starting with Mass at 6:30 p.m at Holy Cross Parish in Hamilton. You can contact Bill Boros at billboros@hotmail.com or 905-383-6269. There is a new Ultreya started in Cambridge. The Fergus Ultreya will host an Advent Retreat on December 13th.
The School of Leaders will continue in November.
With Communications, David continues to send out our newsletter/communiqué.
We would like to thank Dianne Rovers who was our treasurer for the Secretariat for many, many months. We thank Dianne for her dedication to the Cursillo movement.
Please read the presentation given by David Milne to the School of Leaders in Sept. 2008. For those who were at the last School of Leaders and for those who were not, I would like to bring you up to date on the comments I made at that time. I heard some say they did not want changes made to weekends while team formation was taking place. We will make sure this does not happen again. Changes will be made at a different time of the year, away from team formation. I heard some say that if there was a controversial issue that it would be good if the Secretariat heard the opinions of Cursillistas before a final decision would be made. We will make sure to call a general meeting when most can be available to have an open discussion first. I heard someone say “Where is the make a friend, be a friend and bring that friend to Christ in all of this? The sponsor palanca letter is the one connection the candidate has with their friend during the weekend.” Other points were also brought forward for and against this presentation.
The Secretariat discussed this further at our last meeting and at this time the issue is still unresolved.
Father Frank Reitzel, our Spiritual Director shared with us at the last Secretariat meeting this beautiful prayer.
Prayer for Unity
You, the one
From whom on different paths
All of us have come.
To whom on different paths
All of us are going.
Make strong in our hearts what unites us;
Build bridges across all that divides us;
United make us rejoice in our diversity.
And at one in our witness to your peace,
A rainbow to your glory, Amen.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB
taken from Christopher News Notes
I wish you a prayerful Advent and a blessed Christmas
De Colores
Sandi Farwell,
Lay Director
The Fergus Ultreya is hosting our Advent Retreat this year on December 13th. Many thanks to St. Paul the Apostle Ultreya who have hosted the retreat for several years and a special thank you to Fergus for taking it on this year.
The retreat format is as follows:
Hope to see you there.
The topic at the September 20th School of Leaders was personal palanca letters. Here is a copy of the presentation given by David Milne. There was much discussion after the presentation and, as Sandi Farwell's note above says, Secretariat has started discussing the feedback and no decision has been made yet.
I am here today to tell you about a decision Secretariat has made regarding personal palanca letters on the weekend and to tell you how and why we made it. The letters I’m talking about are the ones that are addressed to a specific candidate. These are the letters that are given directly to a candidate on the weekend and not the group letters that are displayed on the palanca table.
Secretariat has decided that personal palanca letters should come just from the sponsors (if at all) and that personal palanca letters will be placed in the candidates take home envelopes. In other words, the candidates will not receive any personal palanca letters during the weekend.
This has not been an easy decision for us to make. We all have stories about how a weekend palanca letter has touched us or touched a candidate. But as Secretariat we are called “to preserve … and reinvigorate the mentality, the purpose and the basic methodology that define the Movement.” We look to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Cursillos (the CCCC) for direction on preserving the mentality, the purpose and the basic methodology of the movement. Since 1992 the CCCC has been on a journey of rediscovering the Foundational Charism of the Movement. Eduardo Bonin and others from the Mallorcan School of Leaders have visited Canada on several occasions and leaders from Canada have gone to Mallorca to study and share with Eduardo and the Mallorcan Cursillistas. Most recently members of the CCCC and of our Secretariat attended a Cursillo of Cursillos in Mallorca.
One of the fruits of this study has been a fresh understanding of palanca and palanca letters.
The CCCC is not an authoritarian body but one of service. Each Diocesan movement maintains autonomy under the authority of the diocesan bishop. The primary function of the CCCC is to ensure that the Movement in Canada stays true to its origins and faithful to the Foundational Charism.
In other words the CCCC did not decide how the Hamilton Diocese movement should handle personal palanca letters. We, the Secretariat, made the decision to distribute personal palanca letters at the end of the weekend.
It is important to recognize that doing palanca and sending palanca are two different things. Doing palanca is still an essential part of Cursillo. Palanca is the prayers, sacrifices and works of mercy (FI 180) offered to God by Christian communities and Christian individuals. Palanca must accompany all evangelizing or conversion efforts. The word ‘palanca’ is a Spanish word meaning ‘lever’. Just as a lever allows a person to move things which are beyond his/her strength alone, prayer and sacrifice allow an apostle to accomplish more than he/she would be capable of achieving alone.
This is a mystery of our faith. To offer palanca is to put into practice the dogma of the Communion of Saints. As mentioned by Pius XII in his Encyclical on the Mystical Body:
“This is a truly tremendous mystery on which one can never meditate often enough: that the salvation of many is dependant on the prayers and voluntary mortifications of the members of the Mystical Body of Christ”. (FI 333)
“The [candidates] should be made aware of the spiritual presence of prayer communities, so that once they have experienced for themselves the difference it makes in terms of their own conversion, they will thereafter take it as normal to pray and make sacrifices for brothers and sisters one does not know personally. Such communities, which belong to the mystery of the Communion of Saints, bear witness to the possibility and importance of Christianity in every part of the world and to the fact that God continues to make Himself present in history through core groups of people who live the Gospel and who do their utmost to make this a better world.” (FI 334)
The candidates are made aware of these prayer communities by means of Father’s comments during the Grace talk and by the palanca table that is set up on Friday.
Doing palanca is crucial to the success of all Cursillo undertakings, especially the weekend.
Sending personal palanca letters is another story.
The Weekend Rollo given at the Cursillo of Cursillos had this to say about personal candidate palanca letters and about putting pressure on candidates:
“In some places personalized communications to candidates are sent through “palanca letters” and even giving advice to the candidates on what to do or which attitude to take. It is not advisable to give or even make these communications, since they could put pressure on the candidates. Personalized letters are not advisable at all.
Decisions of candidates taken under pressure of any kind, are not authentic, are not decisions taken with conviction, which are the ones that will be valuable in their life; if decisions are taken by someone overcome by emotion as soon as the emotion disappears the decision changes. And that is why after the weekend they often feel deceived and disappointed. ”
The CCCC says:
“Having personal letters … delivered to candidates at one or more times during the weekend, in many instances, will take them right back to their lives outside the weekend; many times this is not a good thing. Many candidates will not have reached the point where they are ready to face the reality of life in their own environments. They are very vulnerable and to thrust them back to what might be difficult situations in the world too early may have a detrimental effect. It may not seem that way, but who knows how much deeper some candidates may have gone into knowing themselves and God had they not been faced with what can be the distraction of the outside world. The focus for the first two days is first on Self, the encounter with Self, and then on Christ, encounter with Him. Everything that is done in these first two days is focused into the weekend. Sometimes the work that takes place within a person is difficult and painful. A warm and fuzzy letter might create a serious stumbling block to the work that is being done. As human beings, we are very skilled at being diverted when things are uncomfortable.”
The CCCC also says:
“Remember, the candidates will not know anything about personal palanca therefore they will not miss it.”
CCCC’s position is that they have made the decision to accept the words of Eduardo as the authentic method and mentality. If we cannot understand the reasoning then further study is needed until it becomes clear.
One of the forms of palanca is self denial. If you are having trouble letting go of the practice of delivering personal palanca letters during the weekend then consider this letting go as a form of personal sacrifice for you, a form of palanca.
DE COLORES
Please send me (drmilne@sympatico.ca) any talks you think should be published so we can publish a witness talk every month. Please realize that I will have to use my judgment on whether or not a talk is published so it's possible that not every talk will get published.
I was praying the other day about all the tasks I have to do (even though I am retired) and how far behind I am in getting them done. Then I realized that I had agreed to do all these tasks as a way of sharing the gifts God has given me. I further realized that the things I have to do are not tasks but are opportunities to produce good fruit for the Lord. I thank the Lord for this insight and for the opportunity to produce good fruit by sharing my gifts. I hope and pray that you too may have many opportunities to share your gifts and will take advantage of them to produce good fruit.
De Colores!