Today marks the exciting occasion of the start of the XV plenary assembly, in Accra, of the Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), which coincides with the organization’s 40th anniversary of activity. About 200 delegates, including cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and all manner of lay folk will take part in the talks, which will end on August 1. The theme chosen for this year’s edition is: “SECAM, 40 years later: autonomy and perspectives for the Church in Africa”. According to the Religious Information Service (Sir), the inaugural session shall be marked by the presentations of monsignor Gabriel Charles Palmer Buckle, interim president of the Episcopal Conference of Ghana, monsignor Léon Kalenga, apostolic Nuncio, who will read no less than a message from the Holy Father himself, and by John Evans Atta-Mills, president of Ghana. There will also be messages from organisms at the Vatican, including the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Pontifical Council Justice and Peace and Caritas Internationalis, from the sister Episcopal Conferences and by the president of SECAM, cardinal Polycarp Pengo, who presides over the Assembly. The regional Episcopal Conferences shall present the evaluations of the Second Synod for Africa of 2009 and the initiatives set out after the summit. SECAM is the product of young African bishops, after Vatican II, to speak with a single voice, and after the first ever visit by a pope, Paul VI, in the heart of Africa, in 1969 in Uganda. SECAM’s organism’s is based in Accra

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