Porto Alegre - WCC general assembly

The 9th Assembly has been declared the Youth Assembly par excellence and this is not just hollow rhetoric. The spirited and colourful life in the Mutirão, with its more than 2300 participants, is a magnificent example of how an official structure can be animated and galvanized in the background through diversity and celebration.

But the youth are also an important presence among the delegates, with 15% of the official church representatives being under 30. The second day of the GA, Feb 15th, and the first day of business, witnessed the first struggles to secure the space for the new generation in the Assembly Committees, with the German delegation proposing the co-option of a youth in the Nominations Committee, one of the first groups to be voted by the Assembly and one in which the youth were not represented.

The initiative was well received. Clapping and cheers accompanied the request in the plenary (they also were heard when other "minorities" tried to make their voice heard). But not everyone was happy. Our sources say that more conservative voices cynically and somwhat irresponsibly commented that the Mutirão, given its location in the carnival-oriented Brazil, is merely a summer festival, and that the issue of co-opting a youth representative in the NC is barely serious, despite the credentials of the young adult. However, it was under one condition that the respective Oriental bishop would agree that the youth be co-opted, namely if the person was ordained. His argument: only clergy can in reality tend to the welfare of the church. This caused some uproar, and according to German sources, this should have happened in the plenary, just to give everybody an idea of where backwardness can lead.

But the little uproar caused by these remarks has been somewhat put to rest by the extraordinary emphasis on youth of the Moderator, Catholicos Aram I, during his report. Reading the rather long document (available on the WCC assembly website) he took the liberty of skipping many pages due to time constraints. But he read the entire section on Youth and this was accompanied by frenzied applause.

The report of the Moderator, also his WCC testament, was a strong argument that with the change of the current moderator, the Orthodox voice loses an open mind in the higher structures of the WCC. Aram I's words casted an implacable shadow on the contemptuous remarks of bishop Yeznik Petrossian.
Sometimes hierarchy matters. ;)

Stay tuned,
Cristian