Letter of the General Minister
Br Mauro Jöhri OFMCap
Meetings of the General Council
10 February 2016
Prot. N. 00076/16
TO ALL THE MINISTERS AND CUSTODES OF THE ORDER
Dear Brothers,
May the Lord give you peace!
In the effort to always improve the service that our General Curia is called to give to the whole Order, it is necessary to give you some clear guidelines regarding documents that are sent to us in the course of events in the life of the circumscriptions.
In recent years, documentation that has come to us from the circumscriptions has been, above all, in electronic format. Then, only later, does the paper copy arrive by mail or courier service. In practice, there have been many cases of long delay in the arrival of the originals at the General Curia, sometimes because of postal problems, whether national or international, or sometimes because the circumscription has delayed in sending them. In still other cases, there has been dissimilarity between the material sent electronically and what comes to us in the originals. This has created not a few problems in our administrative and juridical offices and in our working with the Holy See.
Toward the end of streamlining the flow of documents that come to us, from now on the ordinary practice of the Curia will be to accept only original documents; these must arrive at least ten days before the beginning of the meeting of the Council.
The following are the dates of the upcoming meetings of the General Council:
7-18 March 2016;
20 June- 1 July 2016;
19-30 September 2016;
14-18 November 2016;
9-20 January 2017;
27 March -7 April 2017;
19-30 June 2017;
18-29 September 2017;
20-24 November 2017;
8-19 January 2018;
12-23 March 2018;
18-29 June 2018.
I remind you, however, dear brothers, that this does not in any way exclude the support that the General Secretariat (sg@ofmcap.org) and the Office of the General Procurator (procura@ofmcap.org) will continue to offer you by means of email. You can continue to send the various documents in electronic format before sending originals, especially those of a juridical nature, in order to avoid having to send the documents many times because they are incomplete or lacking the necessary signatures. The work on them at the offices of the Curia, however, will begin only when the originals arrive.
Exceptions to this ordinary practice of our Curia, which may occur because of urgent need, will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
In a spirit of cooperation, I ask you to follow these guidelines you have received. I take the occasion to greet all of you fraternally.
Br. Mauro Jöhri
General Minister OFM Cap.
Rome, 10 February 2016