The image is particularly powerful in the Azores because “crossing to the other shore,” in a diocese composed entirely of islands, ceases to be merely a Gospel metaphor. Here, crossing has always meant something. It has meant departure and return, emigration and homecoming, absence and expectation. It has meant standing before the horizon and knowing that another human world exists beyond the water. The new Pastoral Project can therefore be read as something more profound than a program for 2026–2027: it is an intensely Azorean meditation on what it means to remain a community at a time when so many people live physically, emotionally, socially, or spiritually distant from one another.
One of the document’s most striking ideas could become the central axis of the essay: a Christian community that does not know the names and faces of those who regularly belong to it risks becoming not the People of God, but “a crowd of strangers.” There is an entire philosophy of contemporary loneliness contained in that image. Perhaps one of the great crises of our time is not simply the decline of religious practice, but the erosion of proximity itself. We possess the technological means to communicate instantly across oceans and continents, yet increasingly we fail to know the person sitting beside us.
From there, the essay could contemplate a Church approaching its five-hundredth anniversary that is being asked not simply to celebrate its history, but to interrogate its purpose. The Diocese of Angra was created in 1534; as 2034 approaches, memory alone cannot constitute a future. An ancient Church remains alive only when it is capable of becoming a pilgrim again. Five centuries should therefore not become merely an accumulation of years, ceremonies, institutions, and anniversaries. They should become an examination of conscience: after five hundred years, whom are we still failing to reach?
And here the “other shore” becomes inhabited by real people. It is the shore of the young person who no longer recognizes himself or herself in the language of the Church. The shore of those who left and never returned. The shore of those who still believe but no longer belong. The shore of the baptized whose faith has become intermittent or fractured. It is inhabited by families transformed by contemporary life, by the elderly who experience solitude, by the poor and socially fragile, by those wounded by institutions, by those who doubt, by those who search for God without knowing what name to give that search, and even by those who may never again cross the threshold of a church.
To reach them requires something more difficult than inviting them back. It requires crossing toward them. That distinction may contain the deepest theological challenge of the project. The Gospel does not describe Christ waiting comfortably on one shore for the wounded man of the Gerasenes to find his way across the sea. Christ enters the boat. He accepts the uncertainty of the crossing. He encounters the storm. He reaches foreign territory. And there, among those considered different, marginal, even disturbing, he restores dignity to a human being.
The Church proposed by this Pastoral Project must therefore become less preoccupied with defending the security of the boat and more willing to remember why the boat exists.
The storm itself is essential to the metaphor. The disciples are frightened because crossing exposes their vulnerability. So too does genuine encounter. A Church that moves toward contemporary society cannot expect to remain untouched by its questions, contradictions and wounds. Conversion, as the document insists, cannot be regarded as a completed achievement. Faith is not possession. It is movement. Christianity understood merely as certainty risks becoming immobile; Christianity understood as encounter remains capable of surprise.
There is also something profoundly beautiful in the project’s insistence upon welcome: to love before judging, to listen before imposing, to create a place where those arriving from another shore may first tell their stories, including their wounds. Such a Church becomes maternal not because it possesses all the answers, but because it knows how to receive a human being before reducing that person to a category.
This may also be why the project places such importance on prayer, retreats, formation, companionship and community. One cannot cross indefinitely without an interior harbor. Mission without spirituality becomes activism; spirituality without mission risks becoming enclosure. The two require one another, just as the boat requires both movement and a compass.
And perhaps the most beautiful paradox of the entire project lies here: as the Diocese of Angra prepares to reach five hundred years of existence, it is being invited not to grow old within itself.
It is being asked to cross. In a land shaped by sailors and fishermen, emigrants and returnees, departures and homecomings, few images could be more profoundly Azorean. For five centuries, these islands have understood that the sea can separate, but they have also learned that the sea can connect. The Atlantic is distance, but it is also passage. Every harbor contains both farewell and possibility.
Perhaps faith is something similar. A Church can remain on the familiar shore, protecting what it inherited, counting those who remain, remembering those who once filled its pews. Or it can push the boat once more into uncertain waters, carrying memory without becoming imprisoned by it, trusting that beyond the horizon there are still people waiting to be encountered rather than conquered, listened to rather than judged, accompanied rather than summoned.
Because an island that no longer crosses the sea eventually turns the ocean into a wall. And a Church that ceases to seek the other shore risks turning faith into a harbor from which the boats no longer depart.
Based on a story in Atlântico Epxresso-Natalino Viveiros director. Photo from AE.