For the Daughters of Jesus, the framework of this December 8 celebration is the preparation for General Congregation XIX (GC XIX). In Stage I, when we began our journey, we were asked a question: What do we want to recognize and honor?
On the eve of the Immaculate Conception, the anniversary of the birth of the Congregation, we acknowledge and honor Mother Candida with the gratitude that Maria del Carmen de Friaspostulator of her cause for canonization, collected at the end of the book “Where God calls you”.
It is a text to savor, to pray, to let it inspire us on the path that the Lord invites us to walk today to have more life, honoring the inheritance received. Shall we go? What shall we answer when the Lord shows us the good path? (Jer 6:16).
It ends like this Carmen de Frias:
Do you remember, Mother? On December 7 you were on your way to Salamanca. Father Herranz was with you. You rested in the security that he gave you and your first companions. There you were going to find fertile soil for sowing and people who would help you to fertilize it, some with support, others with obstacles and annoyances. But none of this was able to deter you because your heart was open to everything.
Some point out a defect in you: you lowered yourself too much. You served at the table, you washed the dishes. But you did it to encourage them sometimes, and sometimes out of devotion, as on the vespers of Good Friday and the Immaculate Conception. Sometimes it was to make up for those who could not do it and always to set a good example for everyone.
For all this, thank you, Mother!
From your faith flowed that phrase:
We are Daughters of Jesus and our Father, who cares for the birds of the field, will not abandon us.
With sure hope in God, you said to your counselors:
Our cause is placed in the hands of God. We are Daughters of Jesus and He will defend us from all evil. This is our hope and we will not be confused.
Your heroic charity , your love and recognition of God led you to exclaim:
It has truly been a great grace that we have been approved in such calamitous times as the ones we are going through and so soon and so definitely. How good God is who loves us so much!
And from your deep love for God flowed the desire for your daughters to live gratitude in this way:
Let us be very grateful by being faithful and true Daughters of Jesus.
Because you appeared sure in your judgments, impartial in your determinations, discreet in your way of proceeding, you were asked for advice by those at home and abroad, who sensed in you the supernatural virtue of prudence. This is what Doña Hermitas told you in a letter:
Believe me, my dear daughter, that I miss you very much, and if I had the happiness of seeing you, I would tell you everything that my heart feels and I would listen to your advice, which is so valuable to me.
They also say that you were just with God. To Him you gave the worship due and you were delicate and exact in His service. And you were just with men. In what today we call “social justice” and “universalism”, which always acts in favor of the excluded, you were ahead of your time and in your schools, as in your heart, there was room for everyone from the first day.
Herranz, who had planned the work with you, wrote to another Jesuit friend of his, when the Congregation was still in its infancy, that the Daughters of Jesus were
to teach internal and external, rich and poor, here and there?
A witness of your life has left this praise written about you, which speaks of your deep respect for people:
Mother Candida treated the high without baseness and the low without haughtiness.
Your heroic fortitude was summed up by a bishop in this phrase:
I have tried them a lot, especially Mother Candida, and I have seen that they are looking for Christ Crucified.
The continuous self-denial of everything and of yourself, which was the climate of your life, brought you more and more into union with God and thus you achieved a true availability for all that He asked of you in your mission as foundress.
Your humility was cemented in the many humiliations, which is where it matures and grows best, and you said when they praised you that it seemed to you that they were making fun of you, because in your simplicity and detachment there was no room for praise.
You joyfully suffered poverty, which was an inseparable companion of your life, and in obedience you united yours fully to the will of God, who was marking out the path for you.
And all this, with Mary, to whom you prayed in this way from your dedicated heart:
And since you see me so alone in the enterprise I have begun, be my sweet helper, do not leave me, Beloved Mother.
Thank you, Lord, for this path opened in the Church on December 8. Thank you to the Daughters of Jesus who have served you on it. To those of us who continue to walk, give us the grace to honor the inheritance we have received by being faithful to our today.
Happy Immaculate Conception Day!
María del Carmen de Frías, FI – From the book “Where God calls you”. Pp. 365-367.
