MESSAGE OF THE SUPERIOR GENERAL ON THE 12TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CANONIZATION OF MOTHER CANDIDA
On the eve of her trip to the East, Graciela wrote a letter to the Daughters of Jesus on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of the canonization of M. Cándida. In it she invites us to:
– connect with our Foundress,
– to refresh the charisma and
– to see our poverty as God’s time of salvation for us.
It is a message for the Daughters of Jesus and for so many lay people who find in his charism your way of following Jesus.
On this day that we remember the canonization of our Foundress, I want to get in touch with you.
The fact that the Church has officially recognized that the path traced by M. Candida was a path to live the beatitudes and that she made us like Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, has been a further confirmation of our vocation as Daughters of Jesus.
Pope Francis in his letter Gaudete et Exsultate n. 4 tells us: “The saints who have already come into the presence of God maintain with us bonds of love and communion.” Let us allow ourselves to be stimulated by the signs of holiness that the Lord presents to us in our Foundress. Let us look back at his life, at his writings, at his letters, where he simply speaks to us of God the Father, of Jesus as the whole of his existence, of seeking the Will of God in everything and in it finding happiness. Let us live like her from faith and infinite trust in the Providence of God, that is, everything that happens for the good of those who love the Lord. Let her mother’s affection, that she engendered us in the Spirit as Daughters of Jesus, continue to protect us. “All very united in a holy peace and fraternal charity, mutually helping each other…” (CMF TII, 458)
I invite you to return to poverty together with our poor Mother. Poverty that for us, as for all religious life in the Church, today can have the face of decline, of not having all the vocations we would like, of aging, of our advancing middle age… We need to look with a “hope new” that poverty to believe that this is also “time of salvation” and that the Father continues to show us his face. Poverty that does not close us in on ourselves but makes us look at the world and feel there what God is asking of us. A world that today continues to be affected by the post-pandemic and by war and the consequences that they bring about the impoverishment of a good part of humanity. For a long time we have been trying to discover what the Lord wants from us today, these who we are, with our ages and with the dreams and aspirations that do not leave us.
Last Sunday we celebrated World Mission Sunday. Was it by chance that Graciela spoke to us in her letter about our presence in frontier places like Cuba or Mozambique?
Cuba is living a situation of extreme poverty and precariousness in many aspects. Our presence is becoming less and less, as the Superior General told us:
We are aware that the presence on the frontiers of the Congregation must be taken care of by the whole body. Today I am in dialogue with different sisters to see if it is possible to send them to this country. If any of them feels in the Lord that she could be available to go to Cuba, I would be grateful.
I invite each Daughter of Jesus to ask herself this question: can I be sent? How available am I to go to any part of the world where obedience points me? I invite each one of you to re-read the first paragraph of the Formula and pass it through your heart, stopping at the last part of that paragraph. And I let myself feel what the Spirit moves in me.
In the case of Mozambique, the north of the country has been suffering since 2017 from a conflict with jihadist groups that has caused some 670,000 displaced people and the danger to life is constant.
We end with the first paragraph of the World Mission Sunday 2022 prayer:
Come, Holy Spirit, move us!
Give us your strength and inspiration
to go out of the known terrain
and go further, beyond,
to the ends of the earth!
