RAOEN was introduced at the Caritas Asia Regional Conference & Partners’ Forum in Bangkok, Thailand on 11 to 13 June 2024, where the ecclesial network was presented through a brief online sharing from RAOEN Coordinator Pedro Walpole SJ.
At the partners’ forum were 25 Caritas member organizations in Asia, nine Caritas Global Partners, and 11 Caritas Asia network organizations, and around 90 participants joined the regional conference with the theme Responding to the cry of the earth and cry of the poor for resilient and inclusive communities.
During the inaugural session, there were inspiring talks from Archbishop Peter B Wells, Apostolic Nuncio to Thailand and Cambodia, Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi of the Archdiocese of Tokyo and President of Caritas Internationalis, and Alistair Dutton, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis.
As Pedro shared during the regional conference:
“RAOEN is a very simple reality. The risk index for Oceania and Asia is very high. All of our rivers are charged from the stream of rivers from above. Oceania and Asia harbor a diversity of Indigenous cultures whose traditional knowledge and practices are deeply rooted in values and relations to the ocean, land, and forest. In Asia, over 450 million live in or around tropical forests and savannahs, and of them, 84 million live in extreme poverty. In Oceania, forests comprise 70% of the land area of the vast ocean states. We have a very different ecosystem that builds the climate system of a biome, and we need to incorporate their concerns if we’re going to deal with the concerns in Asia. This is why we began an ecclesial network several years ago to renew our vision and commitment to a church that dialogues.”