Our Easter celebrations have just finished and all of us, bishops of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference (SACBC) start our journey to Rome for the "Ad Limina Apostolorum" visit.
The visit had been done every five years and we had been waiting for our time to do it as the last one was done in 2006. Last year we were informed that we would be meeting Pope Francis soon after Easter.
We will doing it in three groups:
- the Metropolitan Provinces of Cape Town and Bloemfontein on Thursday morning,
- the Metropolitan of Durban on Friday morning and
- the Metropolitan Provinces of Johannesburg and Pretoria on Saturday morning.
Each group has been allocated a couple of hours with Pope Francis to share on the joys, hopes and struggles of the people of God in our areas.
The visit will "officially" start on Wednesday morning with Mass at St Peter's, presided by Archbishop Stephen Brislin, who is the president of the SACBC.
Together with meeting the Pope, we will be having other meetings with member of other offices in the Holy See. In fact, later that day we will have our first meeting at Caritas.
We will be finishing on May 1 with the celebration of the Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore, with the friends of the SACBC living in Rome.
Keep us in your prayers!
