Archbishop Richard Smith says he is happy to confirm the bishops conference will proceed with the elements of the pastoral plan for life and family for 2013 and for a preparatory year during 2012. BCC File Photo.Catholic Organization for Life and Family will help launch the bishops’ conference plan in 2013
By Deborah Gyapong
The Canadian Catholic News

OTTAWA (CCN)--The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops will proceed with a pastoral plan for life and family that will be launched nationally in 2013 after a preparatory year in the dioceses.

In a letter to his brother bishops dated Dec. 8, CCCB president Archbishop Richard Smith of Edmonton wrote that the CCCB’s permanent council has given the proposed plan a green light, after reviewing the practical aspects of the decisions made at the bishops’ annual plenary meeting in October.

“I am happy to confirm that we will proceed, as we had all agreed, with the elements of the pastoral plan for 2013 and for a preparatory year during 2012,” Archbishop Smith wrote. “The proposed elements of the pastoral plan and possible suggestions for the preparatory year are, of course, subject to your own decisions as bishops in your respective dioceses.”

“It will be for you to decide how to adapt the elements of the plan to your own evolving pastoral needs, diocesan resources, and local priorities.”

The letter refers to an address to the recent plenary by previous CCCB president Bishop Pierre Morissette. In it he “reminded us that the family is closely linked to the new evangelization, since it is the most basic ‘school’ for us to teach the values of justice, peace, and reconciliation.”

Archbishop Smith also noted the Pope had also linked the new evangelization and the family in an address in early December in which he described the family as “an individual microcosm of the Church, a community which is saved and saves, which is evangelized and evangelizes.”

The Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF) will assist the CCCB in the development of any resources needed for the pastoral plan and its implementation, which will be coordinated through CCCB general secretary Msgr. Pat Powers. He will review material and send on resources that may help bishops in their diocesan plans, Archbishop Smith wrote.

Although his letter did not include any details of the plan, in an interview with CCN on Oct. 21 after the October plenary, the archbishop gave some general outlines of what it might include:

New ways for Canada’s bishops to take a lead on life and family issues.

Catechesis, with the cornerstone being the “mystery and beauty of the family, because that’s where life begins, where life is nurtured, and where growth in Christian living takes place.”

Marriage preparation and efforts to help couples “understand the majesty of the Church’s teachings on the mystery of family,” and how marriage is a sign of the Lord’s “unconditional and unbreakable love for the Church.”

Teaching on welcoming children as a gift and honouring them.

Greater integration of Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body in both marriage preparation and catechesis about human dignity and the family.

Celebrating family and life and lifting it up, perhaps through dedicating a week every year to celebrating family and life.

The CCCB has also closed down the Ad Hoc Committee on Life and Family (this is not COLF) that made the plan’s recommendations, Archbishop Smith wrote.

This committee was one of two set up two years ago in response to a series of online reports by LifeSiteNews.com and some blogs that the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace was funding projects through overseas partners that were “pro-abortion,” or that advocated for social change contrary to the Church’s teachings.

The other ad hoc committee that was struck to guide CCODP in bringing its policies in line with the Pope’s social justice encyclical Caritas in Veritate will continue its mandate.

This committee met earlier this year with a CCODP liaison committee over some differences in determining how projects will be approved, as concerns had been raised about the lay-run character of the development agency and its ability to work with coalitions that may include non-Catholic groups.

Joint meetings of these committees will continue to be a forum for working out differences between the lay-run organization and the CCCB over which partners can be funded.

In an 2010 interview before that year’s CCCB plenary, Msgr. Powers told CCN the life and family committee chaired by Bishop Ronald Fabbro of London had discovered “a tremendous thirst” within the nearly 20 life and family organizations it had consulted “to be hearing more from their bishops and to be having more communication with them.”