General Assembly

01 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY GENERAL

Bro Lino Da Campo, FSF

SECRETARIAT

1. Work of the Secretariat
The service required of the Secretariat is of a high quality and the members of the Secretariat try to provide this in a competent, serious, dedicated and committed manner.

Their work has many facets, as does our life as Consecrated, and requires dedication beyond the official office hours (8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.) which are used for meetings and general everyday contacts.

Very often work continues in the afternoon or starts before eight in the morning.

2. Objectives
The Secretariat has tried - and continues to try - all possible ways to be a living presence in the various historic events of the Church and, as far as lies within its competence, in the path taken by each of its member Institutes.

The Union’s major means of making history is the publication of the Conference Papers of the Assemblies. To this end the Secretariat:

A - has attempted to pay great attention to the careful preparation of texts whose themes are recognized to be growing ever more substantial and relevant to the present.

B - has chosen to use print rather than duplication for the publication in order to leave a future record of the sequence of ideas and working methods used by the USG so as to assist the Consecrated Life (it is well known that after a number of years duplicated documents become illegible).

C - has tried to achieve wider circulation of the Conference Papers; some Superiors General have requested several copies to pass on to Provincials or other brothers and they have also been distributed outside the circle of the USG. (We are pleased to be able to say that a number of young religious have come looking for them to assist their university studies.)

3. Technical Awareness
In the genuine desire to provide a constantly improving and ever more rapid service, and aware of the limited number of its in-house personnel, the Secretariat has chosen to maintain state of the art technological equipment - computers, photocopiers, fax... a policy reversal which we believe is extremely useful to the USG.

4. Index Personarum
The publication of the Index Personarum in its new format has been much appreciated. We would have liked to produce and reproduce it more quickly but this has proved impossible owing to communication difficulties with several curias and the delay in receiving replies, even after repeated requests.

5. Research and Archives
Ongoing researches and those already completed will enable us to provide an increasingly efficient service. Data stored in the archives is strictly limited to USG documents.