April 15–17, 2027
ROME
Vatican
Vocations and Charisms.
The Theology of God’s Gifts
for a Synodal and Missionary Church
A Message of Invitation from Cardinal Ouellet :
Join us in a study on “Vocations and Charisms” to rekindle the flame of the Gospel in the hearts of all the baptized!
The Spirit is at work in the communion of vocations and the embrace of charisms: let us unite for a new springtime of the Church!
Your participation in this research will be a sign of hope amid the trials of our time.
Research Perspective of the Symposium
This symposium follows two others on the fundamental theology of the priesthood (2022) and the anthropology of vocations (2024), which were attended by His Holiness Pope Francis, and whose proceedings we have published in several languages. This third symposium builds upon the ecclesiological and anthropological reflection that laid the foundation for a theology of vocations and charisms in service to the missionary and synodal conversion of the Church.
To this end, a theology of God’s gifts develops a Trinitarian perspective that arises from the gifts of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit—gifts that are complementary and distinct within the Church, which is institutional and charismatic, but first and foremost Marian.
Our interpretation of divine gifts pays particular attention to the fundamental grace of Baptism and to the co-essentiality of hierarchical and charismatic gifts, in accordance with the orientation of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, chapter 4, as articulated in the document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Iuvenescit Ecclesia, whose tenth anniversary we are celebrating this year.
Our primary concern is to highlight the unity, beauty, and universality of the Christian vocation in its many varied forms—all of which are missionary in nature under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, yet all centered on Christ Jesus and his holy Mother, the archetypes of every vocation.
We hope thereby to present an attractive and dynamic vocational horizon rooted in the grace of Baptism, which unfolds in a wide variety of charisms—differentiated either by the choice of a state of life or by God’s call within the particular circumstances of each person’s life— but first and foremost by the universal Gift of the Holy Spirit, which makes the Church an essentially missionary and synodal communion open to dialogue with all cultures.