Dear sisters and dear brothers,

 

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Superiors General, it is with great joy and a deep feeling of gratitude to God that I greet each one of you and welcome you very cordially to this gathering.

  We are assembled here for our Plenary meeting that is traditionally held every three years, and we would like first of all to thank each one of you for your commitment, your effort and your participation during the last three years.  As Women Disciples of Jesus Christ, you have assumed our common commitment to live a spirituality of reconciliation and to carry forth this reconciliation into our wounded world.

 This commitment was enriched, deepened and led to multiple concrete actions, thanks also to the International Congress on Consecrated Life which was held in 2004, with the theme of “Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity”.

The Plenary is

•   par excellence a place to meet, to share, to listen to the voice of the Spirit, in community;
• a privileged space where we can create and deepen relationships and increase our love for one another;
• a favourable time to confirm our dynamic fidelity to the call of God;
• the place where we can perceive together new horizons and have the courage to reorient and renew our life and our mission, in order to be a meaningful and authentic sign of hope and of life in abundance in our suffering world; a world in which all kinds of poverty cry out for justice for all, and in an even more urgent way, for persons who suffer most from exclusion and are who the most abandoned.

 The THEME of this Plenary, fruit of your answers to our questionnaire, affirms that we are

“Challenged to weave a new spirituality that generates hope and life for all”.

 Throughout the time that preceded our Plenary, we meditated on the meaning of each element of our theme. We reflected on its impact on the process to adopt in order to maintain ourselves in a dynamic and creative fidelity to our congregational charism in the world of today, while keeping our horizon open on the future. The vocation of the Prophet Jeremiah and the mission given to him by Yahweh often came back to my mind: “Look, today I am setting you over nations and over kingdoms, to tear up and to knock down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jr 1: 10). 

 Our theme draws its inspiration from our common dream.

 As women, we dream of living fully our identity and our mission in this world that is ours.  We dream of being able to go beyond the divisions and the gender stereotypes imposed on us by a society that judges us incapable of thinking, fragile beings, always exposed to irony, in danger of being abused and violated in our body, our heart and our mind.  That is why the Word of God addressed to Jeremiah is also understood by us today, to tear away from our heart every identification with the negative models of the feminine imposed by our cultures, and build new, more truly civilized relationships. The quality of our being as women is not a privilege but a personal call from God.  We cannot choose to be born women, but we can choose to be consecrated women. Like Jeremiah, God sends us towards something very specific!  Our vocation is historic; it was born from a concrete situation. When our founders and foundresses, sensitive to the signs of the times, heard the clamour of the people, they knew how to identify the calls that God addressed to them, and faced with a specific need of the Church and of the world, they concretised in history this call to be messengers of salvation.

Today, as disciples who continue the work undertaken by our founders/foundresses, we are challenged to weave a new spirituality, founded on the WORD. A new spirituality, because the reality in which we incarnate it is new, new are the challenges, and new are the responses. The prophet Isaiah restores our courage (43:19): “ See, I am doing a new deed, even now it comes to light; can you not see it?”

 We are called to perceive already this Life consecrated to the search for the primordial Source - the Word of God incarnated in human history - in order to quench its thirst:. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…the Word was made flesh, and He pitched His tent among us” (Jn 1: 1,14).  We must weave a Paschal spirituality, profoundly human and committed, so that all may have life in abundance.

 To weave a spirituality implies therefore being open to the Spirit and allowing ourselves to be guided by the Spirit.  This implies being sensitive and attentive to the clamor of our time. This means descending and pitching our tent in the midst of humanity to identify the cries of the people who suffer and, always enlightened by the Word, to dare rekindle hope and thus, to be a sign of God’s salvific tenderness in the world.

 In the Bible hope is not a projection of the future. On the contrary, to hope means to live, as in anticipation, there and in the present moment, the future we desire for the world. To weave a new spirituality will probably consist in paving a road of universal solidarity and contributing to the transformation of each person and of the world by means of justice, of peace and of care for the universe.

 For us at this moment in history, solidarity evokes the feeling of a profound and dangerous prophecy.  Indeed, our planet is going through a crisis without precedent, unleashed notably by a globalized capitalistic system that exploits the human being and the whole of creation; a system that does not trouble itself to distribute wealth, thus producing immense divisions, wars and contradiction; a system that provokes the exodus of human masses seeking to survive; that reduces to slavery certain nations to ensure the privileges and power of others. It is dangerous to be in solidarity in this world, because solidarity for the Kingdom is a challenge to this way of governing and organizing the world.

 To weave a new spirituality means, moreover, to establish a process that privileges the constitutive values of the passion for Christ and for humanity.

 The fascination for God and for the Kingdom encourages us, calls us and incites us to enlarge the tent, so that in it a space for hope and for life can be found for the laity, the woman, the “displaced”, that is to say, the excluded, those who have no shelter, no land, those who emigrate in order to survive; and also our earth, the dialogue between cultures and religions. These persons or situations that I have just named constitute the five challenges indicated by your delegates, and on which we will have the occasion to reflect during the Plenary.

 For us consecrated religious, this attitude involves living in a radical way an alternative plan that is counter-cultural and counter-current to the model of our present-day world.   It implies being a sign that contests the counter-values of Faith and of the dehumanisation of the poor.  This has been the origin and the finality of Consecrated Life in the Church and in the world, and will continue to be so.

 Thus are we challenged to weave a new spirituality that will generate hope and life for all in our complex world, where evil seems to supplant the good, and where the means of communication are too often means of manipulation.  To rediscover in this world the meaning of our hope and our life founded on Jesus Christ, incarnated, dead and risen, is today an imperative and a challenge.  The people of Galilee, who lived in the shadowy land of death, as is described in St. Matthew (4:16)… saw a great light:  Jesus.  He is the sign of Hope and of Life for marginalized people.  When the disciples of John came to Him and asked, “Are you the one who is to come or should we wait for another?” Jesus did not give them explanations but rather invited them to listen and look at the concrete signs of hope and of new life: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor are evangelised” (Mt 11: 3-6).

 Hope and life are contingent on a mystique founded on the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus - a powerful and mysterious force of life, but also a concrete action that renders it visible and tangible.  The prophecy of hope and of life is for us an imperative because we ourselves, like all the people of God, need to have our inner strength sustained so that we may truly believe that another world is possible.  “See how former predictions have come true.  Fresh things I now foretell, before they appear, I tell you of them” (Is 42: 9).

 Dear sisters and dear brothers, during these days when we are gathered here, would that we might take some important steps on our journey: one step towards the exterior, outside the current of the history of our present-day world, and the other towards the interior, towards the essential of our vocation as consecrated women and men, that is to say:

§         reach beyond a traditional religious Life that is activist, self-sufficient and secure, towards a religious Life that is powerless, simple, humanized, sharing of the same destiny as the poor;

§         reach beyond an ‘intimist’ spirituality, consisting of a stream of words, far from the realities of life, and advance towards a mystique founded on the Word of God that nourishes our passion for God and our passion for humanity;

§         reach beyond a style of religious Life that is professional and well adjusted to the rules of the system, towards a religious Life that is prophetic, audacious, capable of suggesting new alternatives;

§         reach beyond special offers and temptations of consumerism, of secularism, of individualism…. to a religious Life centred on the defence of the dignity of human life and of all creation;

§         reach beyond the superficiality of exterior appearances to go towards a religious Life that lives from within, from the essential of the human heart, exploiting its humanizing strengths and its capacity to love;

 §         reach beyond stability and security to live on the dangerous frontiers that challenge, where the marginalized of our world suffer. This demands of us a less structured religious Life, less bureaucratic, poorer, freer and more migratory;

§         reach beyond our fears and our human limitations to let God mould us, transform us, save us and send us always and again towards some situation in our life, no matter which, sothat we may be credible and luminous signs of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 With these words I would like to invite you to enter into a climate of prayer, of openness and of sensitivity, of listening to one another and to the Spirit of God in us.

 Imploring the blessing of the very Holy Trinity, the protection of Mary and the intercession of our founders and foundresses, I wish for all of you a creative, joyful and fruitful Plenary.