Faith & Culture: There is no longer Greek and Jew - Archbishop Gerard Pettipas

Keynote Session

Evangelization and the Mission of the Church: Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel. (1 Cor. 9:16) (Saturday 9:00 - 10:00am)

Evangelization, including the new evangelization mandated by Pope John Paul II and the focus of the 2012 Synod, is not extraneous to the mission of the Church – it IS the mission of the Church. The Church of Jesus Christ is by its very definition “missionary”. Christ himself was a missionary, sent to do the will of the Father and to announce the reign of God. We, members of Christ’s Body, continue to bring this mission to bear in the contemporary world. That world has an often unacknowledged hunger for the mission’s message.

Faith & Culture: There is no longer Greek and Jew

Faith and culture engage in a dynamic relationship of mutual influence, confrontation, accommodation and exclusion. Both are definitive of humans, and so the dialogue of faith and culture are at the heart of what it means to be human. History is filled with stories of how culture and faith have interacted to the benefit – and the detriment – of one another.

Archbishop Gerard Pettipas

Archbishop Gerard Pettipas began his vocation as a priest in 1966, at the age of 16, when he left home to test a possible vocation as a Redemptorist priest, first of all at the minor seminary in Brockville ON. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Windsor in 1971 and was ordained a priest in Toronto on May 7th, 1977. Archbishop Pettipas has worked in the vocation of parish ministry in St. John’s, Toronto and Grande Prairie and youth ministry in Toronto, St. John’s and Saint John NB. Archbishop Pettipas was assigned to be pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Grande Prairie and then became the new archbishop of Grouard-McLennan in 2006, and was ordained as a bishop on January 25th, 2007.