(Vatican Radio) The bishops of Poland are making their ad limina visits this week. Among the issues that have come up during the course of bishops’ conversations and small group meetings with Pope Francis are: the situation of families today, with special focus on the problem of declining birth rates and on cultural challenges to the traditional family, and the New Evangelization.Bishop Piotr Libera of the diocese of Plock, in Poland, told Vatican Radio that he asked the Holy Father for some specific ideas to help make local Churches more “kerygmatic” - that is, better oriented to the proclamation of the Good News of salvation. “Our older priests who are not accustomed to this type of preaching the Gospel,” he explained, “are struggling, sometimes they are somewhat ‘closed.’” Bishop Libera related that the Holy Father responded, saying that you have to start from the seminaries, and that seminarians need to learn the missionary spirit.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Warsaw, Kazimierz Nycz, expressed his happiness at the meetings, which he described as extremely interesting. “We talked about the problems of our Church in Poland,” he said, adding, “The Holy Father said that the Church's problems are universal,” – the problems of the Church in every part of the world.
The Polish city of Krakow is to host the 2016 World Youth Day, with cooperation and assistance from all the dioceses in the country. It will be the second international iteration of the event to be held in Poland, after the VI World Youth Day in Czestochowa, in August, 1991.
Text from Vatican Radio website
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