Upcoming event: Alpha Canada bilingual conference
A reader wrote in to let us know of the following:
Father Tom, would you be able to put a link on Adventus and 2000 Stories to the Alpha Canada Website ?
An important Quebec-wide Alpha bilingual conference will be offered at Becket (and the adjoining school) Friday August 15 and Saturday August 16, 2008. Monseigneur Gilles Lemay who has been closely involved with Alpha in Québec City is the Guest of Honour for the opening.
2 tracks are being offered: Basic (for churches who wish to start a new Alpha Course and learn for example how to prepare a Weekend of the Holy Spirit) and Advanced (for teams who would like to improve their course impact and learn ways to better reach Genexers outside the church).
There will also be presentations on Youth Alpha, the Alpha Marriage Course (Elle et Lui en français), and other specialty courses (e.g. Alpha in Prisons, in the Military, in the Workplace).
Alpha teams have been praying for this event and are expecting some 400 participants including members of the Catholic clergy who may not yet be familiar with Alpha.
- Go to www.alphacanada.org (choose Français or English on the top left hand corner).
- Click on Activités & Conférences
- Once the Montreal Conference shows up, click on Plus d’information – it brings you to the Registration Page.
Hope this helps!
not to cause TOO much debate, but I have seen Catholics who have taken Alpha require re-catechization to correct the errors in Alpha. This article expresses some similar concerns:
http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/dissent/alpha1.htm
another analysis of Alpha:
http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=7562
Hi James,
I’ve seen these sorts of objections before, but to be honest they don’t impress me. Basically they present Alpha as some sort of “infiltration” of the pure Catholic faith. They ignore that the Catholic faith is pure only when considering the Church as a whole: the practical pastoral reality is that an individual person has at best an approximate grasp of the Catholic faith. If Alpha can help a person with a more distant approximation come to a closer approximation, then it is pastorally good. The problems mentioned by articles such as these only arise if Alpha is itself taken to be a “pristine” presentation of the Christian faith – a claim it actually never makes.
In my opinion, these articles reveal a great deal about the psychology of the authors. They seem to be coming not only from the idea that the Catholic faith is pristine (it is, in itself) but that it can even be pristine in the way it is understood and lived by individuals. But the faith can only be pristinely lived by the Church as a whole – for individuals, we must accept that our personal understanding is subject to revision based on our current grasp of Tradition and the legitimate development of doctrine. An individual who believes that they have “got it” in their grasp of the faith (when they actually need to see things more humbly) would find himself often ill at ease – especially in the presence of admittedly-non-pristine things like Alpha. But again, Alpha does not claim to be the be-all and end-all of catechetical programs, and why should we not simply accept it for its good points?
BTW, the author of the second article, Bill Cork, abandoned the Catholic faith shortly after writing that article to “go home” to Seventh Day Adventism. In itself this does not invalidate his arguments, but again I’d be cautious about the mentality and hidden assupmtions behind them.
Father,
you make good points and I had forgotten about Bill Cork!!
However, I have seen from personal experience that Alpha seemed to cause more problems than help at my parish.. I actually saw people regress in terms of understanding the sacraments etc… Perhaps, it was how it was run as opposed to the program itself.
But, I take your points seriously!
Have a great Canada Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!