This weekend I had the opportunity to participate in a fantastic meeting of young sisters from Europe in Paris. This meeting was unique, because for the first time I visited St. Francis Xavier’s church, where lies the untouched body of our holy foundress – Madeleine Sophie Barat. Incredibly inspiring for me was also the presentation of our former Mother General, Patricia de Quevedo, who talked about how the Second Vatican Council influened our approach to education and teaching. The words that scrolled through the entire story were: change, change, change …
During these 50 years we had a lot of General Chapters – meetings of delegates from the whole Society. Each of them introduced another step of enormous changes, but the biggest took place in 1964 and 1967, near the end of the Vatican Council. Then the sisters decided with great courage to close many of our big schools, where we educated the elites and go to the poor. We emerged from the enclosure to live with people and among them. We started to see our cultural differences as a great gift, not an obstacle that must be overcome striving for unification. In that time we lost our social position among the clergy very quickly and we lost a lot of sisters who could not accept such changes. But I am deeply convinced that we did not lose the Spirit and we fulfiled with heroic courage the calls of the Council.
I recently saw this poster on the web. It is an invitation from Chile to join the Jesuits. The text on it reads: „Our home is the world.” This is a perfect illustration of how the Spirit worked also in our Community and how God sent us to the peripheries of life. Today I am full of gratitude to the Sisters, who were able to read the signs of time and not losing anything from the wisdom of our Holy Mother, they went into the unknown.
There are some other words that come to my mind, which I have read just before my flight to Paris. They come from Fr. Joseph Ratzinger in 1969: „From today’s crisis – said the future Pope – will emerge a Church, which will lose a lot. It will become small and will have to start over again, more or less from the beginning. It will no longer be able to live in the buildings, which were built in times of abundance. Along with a reduction in the number of its faithful it will lose the greater part of the social privileges. It will start again from small groups of movements and of the minority, which will again put faith in the center of the experience. The Church will be more spiritual, it will not be connected with a political mandate, flirting once with the left, and once with the right. It will be poor and will become a Church of the poor. Then people will see this little flock of believers as something completely new: discover it as hope for them, the answer which they have always looked for in their hearts.”*
Our Congregation awaits another breakthrough, because this summer we are having the next General Chapter. I am very curious which way the Spirit will blow! 🙂
* my translation from polish
