The seven Pathways of Transformation proposed by the last General Chapter are at the heart of the main concern we wish to highlight this year: “All is connected”. We need to provide an evangelising education that lives up to this truth and a way of life that bears witness to it.
Therefore:
- To build a fraternal world through education, evangelization and the promotion of justice,
- To be radically open to God’s will,
- To create renewed structures for the future,
- To embrace an integral ecology,
- To live out our mission in association, with audacity and prophetically,
- And to place financial resources and people at the service of the international mission to ensure its sustainability…
These are not seven separate but interrelated things. Environmental evangelising education is a concrete path that can bring about the transformation we wish to propose through service on the peripheries. This is the approach clearly presented to us by Juan Carlos Stauber. A path rooted in our Declaration on the Lasallian Educational Mission.
Juan Carlos is, above all, a friend. I have had the grace to share much time and many projects with him since we were Theology students. He has taught at one of our schools, assisted in the formation of novices in the Argentina-Paraguay District, and worked with our La Salle Foundation in Argentina at the ‘Laudato si’ Centre for Research in Integral Ecology. I have been blessed to watch him grow and mature personally and professionally over more than forty years. I have met his family, and Marcela, his wife, has also assisted with the formation of our novices.
This text he offers us summaries many of his searches and findings. I am deeply grateful to him for this text, written at a time that included heart surgery for his son, Marcos, and I hope it may be of help to you all. It is an area where we need to take profound, decisive and urgent steps in many parts of our Lasallian landscape. I pray for all this, dear reader.
Brother Santiago Rodríguez Mancini
Director of the Office of Lasallian Heritage and Research
