CELAM and other member institutions of the Pan-Amazon Ecclesial Network, which represents bishops' conferences, religious men and women, and Catholic relief agencies throughout Latin America, had signed a petition requesting the hearing with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Click on Encontro com os Bispos Responsaveis do
CELAM por ocasiao da Reuniao Geral de Coordenacao no Centro de Estudos do Sumare (Rio de Janeiro, 28 de julho de 2013) (Address to the leadership of the Episcopal Conferences of Latin America during the General Coordination Meeting).
It will be useful to study this one national development in the context of the 22 episcopates gathered in
CELAM, and in the whole Catholic development in the western hemisphere.
13) The preferential option for the poor was first given explicit description in a
CELAM document at a meeting in Medellin in 1968 and given to the whole Church in Paul VI's 1971 encyclical Octogesima Adveniens; see Gremillion, Gospel, 474, 496.
Juan de Dios Hernandez Ruiz, auxiliary bishop of Havana, secretary of the COCC, representative of the COCC before
CELAM and member of the Permanent Committee.
10) Some of the leading members of
CELAM included its president in the 1990s, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, who was assisted by representatives of the Chilean Church.
A year later, in his opening address to the fourth
CELAM conference in Santo Domingo, the pope stated that CEBs "must be stamped with a clear ecclesial identity and find in the eucharist, presided over by a priest, the center of their life and communion among their members, in close union with their pastors and full harmony with the church's magisterium.
The
CELAM is the organ of the Vatican in Latin America.
Francis' words were wholly of a piece with the 1968 meeting of
CELAM, the Latin American bishops' council, in Medellin, Colombia.
When Oscar Rodriguez, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, was president of
CELAM (1995-99), he became convinced that the poor of the region were being adversely affected by corruption.
Soon there were regular informal biennial meetings between the Canadian and American conferences with
CELAM (Latin American Bishops' Conference).
12, 1992, speech that opened the Fourth General Conference of the Latin American Bishops, or
CELAM IV.