Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians

Via dell’Ateneo Salesiano, 81

00139 ROME

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To Provincials and the

Superiors of Pre-Provinces

Dearest,

It is with joy that I come to you to announce the theme for the Feast of Gratitude and to initiate with the entire Institute this moment that unites the five continents, every FMA, and every educating community around Mother. For all of us, it is a treasured appointment, an experience of communion and of unity. Together we express our gratitude to the Lord for every sister, for the young people, for all who share our educative mission. Above all, we make room for manifestations of affection and gratitude to Mother for her continual gift of self to us, for being a sign of the Father’s love, a guide who clearly indicates the Lord Jesus with her life and words.

We are in a special communion of affection, prayer, and solidarity with our sisters of Haiti, tried by so much suffering and called to be signs of hope for their people.

The feast of April 26 brings us to Madagascar, the red isle. From 1986, our educative presence has developed with the creative and generous response to the educative needs of the young generations.

Reconciled and unified in Love, we announce Jesus to the young

The Provincial community elaborated this theme with the involvement of the sisters. In this proposal, we can read the missionary horizons opened by the recent Synod for Africa. We perceive the invitation to actuate in depth, the journeys of conversion indicated by GC XXII to unify our life in Love and to be signs of it in today’s world. This is the charismatic path for an efficacious proclamation of Jesus and His message to the young, beyond one’s own Province or nation, to the ends of the earth.

This theme immerses us in the mystery of God’s love that through Jesus, has made humanity one people, breaking down all divisions and separations (Ephesians 2: 14). God gave us His Son even to the Cross to reconcile us to Him. Our peace and reconciliation is Christ crucified and risen. “Through Him, the Father reconciled all things to Himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth, by making peace through His death on the cross” (Colossians 1:20). It is a reconciliation of immense horizons, gratuitously given by God, who has loved us first and has made us the children of His Love. We, consecrated persons, are called to be witnesses and builders of this project of communion that is at the acme of human history when all will be united in the Lord Jesus.

GC XXII gave the Institute a new breath of missionary spirit, a new and more explicit awareness that the charism extends to the whole world. We cannot silence what we have known and experienced, God’s unconditional and faithful love. The missionary proclamation spurs us from within through the experience of being reconciled and unified in Him.

Reconciliation is a grace that generates peace with God, with ourselves, with others, with the cosmos and with creation. It embraces all of reality and shows that the world is loved by God. It is the object of His care, inhabited by His presence, oriented toward a perspective of communion. We are called to convert ourselves to this love, to let ourselves be reconciled! “New heavens and new earth” are the announcement of full reconciliation awaited with active hope, continually generated by God’s mercy and forgiveness that asks for and renders possible gestures of forgiveness and peace.

From the moment that God loved us first (Cf. John 4: 10), love is no longer only a commandment but also a response to a love that redeems and saves, asks for and sustains our free yes, liberating us from every dualism and fragmentation.

Listening to the Word and the Eucharist each day are graces of reconciliation, sources of vocational unity. They make each day a new and deeper encounter with the Lord Jesus, center and heart of our life. They call us to follow as disciples and missionaries, the paths of the Teacher with the passion of those who announce the peace that Jesus gives, ‘pouring out’ His very life in the educative mission actuated by the sisters and laity.

Reconciled with God, we are called to be persons of reconciliation, above all with ourselves, with our history, acknowledging realistically and hopefully, even our limitations and sufferings. By asking God for forgiveness, we hand over our life to Him once again so that He may save us and re-create us. The Father loves us as we are, not because we are good. He loves us because He is good and by loving us, He calls us to make of our poverty, the possibility of an unconditional gift to others.

Reconciliation with ourselves is the way to reconciliation with others, with our sisters, with the young in their demanding logic of taking the first step. Thus we will become like the Father, people of reconciliation and of communion who love according to the measure indicated by Jesus, in life-giving gratuity.

The cenacle is the on-going school of gratuity. The washing of feet and the Eucharist are the sacramental signs that invite us to build communities that are signs of reconciled life, characterized by trust, reciprocal forgiveness, welcoming, the valuing of differences, of overcoming indifference, of the commitment to build authentic relationships. Everyone is a reconciled space inhabited by God and a space to be inhabited through welcoming others. Thus the community becomes the place of journeys toward love. The family spirit, Salesian loving kindness, call for the purification of the memory from events, habits, words that are contrary to communion and that risk closing the heart in bitterness, the dangerous woodworm that gnaws at joy and the generous availability to live one’s vocation.

The personal and community experience of a life reconciled and unified in Love makes possible and gives efficacy to our effort to educate the new generations to be builders of reconciliation in their own life, so fragmented today, in their rapport with others, in this dramatic and marvellous world. Yet it is a world lacerated by many wars and injustice, but athirst for dialogue, respect, and true relationships.

If individual and community lives, even within their fragility, re-center on the Lord Jesus each day, if He becomes more and more the heart of our existence, then we can arouse and cultivate the desire for Him in the hearts of the young. In fact, we can be for them in Jesus, the mediation of an encounter that changes life, gives it meaning and a future, and, above all, gifts them with the experience of gratuitous Love. Such an experience of forgiveness and of salvation calls them to be workers of reconciliation, capable of accepting cultural and religious differences, of respecting the rights and dignity of everyone because we are all children of one Father.

On the horizons of a life reconciled in Love, we can also embrace the call of CG XXII to a true and proper ecological conversion to guard and hand over to future generations creation, as a home to be lived in and a place of peace for all.

The symbol proposed by the Province of Mary Source of Life is that of a boat, an instrument of work, of transportation, of communication, and of communion. It expresses the daily life and the simplicity of the Malgascio people, and it can narrate their history and their origins. The boat is kept afloat by balances, small wooden instruments, which permit long voyages even with heavy loads. They speak to us of strength, of equilibrium, of the peace of a life that is centered and unified in Love. The sails open the boat to the forces of the wind, the image of the Spirit’s creative breath that gives urgency and courage for the great crossings that bring us to Jesus. The Shepherdess of Don Bosco’s missionary dream proposes the grand horizons of evangelization.

Taken together, the chosen symbol constitutes a call to go forth to bring the joy of the Gospel with the grace of a life unified by one sole passion, that of proclaiming Jesus, of being His living memory. It goes beyond every cultural, national, linguistic, and religious barrier. It confirms in us the certainty of Mary’s presence in our mission. She is the woman faithful to one Love alone, the Ausiliatrix and Mother of the Church and of the Institute. With her, we are called to be the sign of Jesus through the power of the da mihi animas cetera tolle and the responsible awareness of ‘I entrust them to you’.

In this time of preparation for the feast, the sisters of Madagascar invite us to two encounter experiences. We are to invoke the grace of reconciliation among the peoples of the entire world with the prayer to Mary composed by Don Bosco or with another prayer. We are to commit ourselves to live attitudes and moments of reconciliation, eventually sending to Sr. Ciri Hernandez the communication of an experience of reconciliation. I invite each Provincial to study, the best way to share this with her own Province and choose the experience to send.

Initially the project for the offerings from the various Provinces was for the reconstruction of the house for a new presence that the Province will start in the diocese of Ambanaja. But a recent message from Sr. Ciri, the Provincial, communicates that in the light of the tragic situation of the Haitian people, she and her Council have decided to ask Mother to direct the Province offerings to our Haitian sisters. She stressed, ‘we continue to entrust ourselves to the Providence that surprises us each day with its love-filled presence.’ We thank our sisters for this gesture of solidarity that is a gift for Mother and for all of us.

I invite you to prepare for the feast, giving time for attitudes of gratitude. It is the attitude of the Magnificat, indicated to us by Don Bosco as the particular characteristic of our identity. Today it risks becoming a rare attitude even among us. Because of this, I want to propose that we make each day an experience of communion in reciprocal gratitude. This is the most beautiful and truest gift of gratitude that we can give to Mother. It expresses our openness to the word and witness she gives us and our readiness to accept the invitation to be responsible for the vitality of the charism and its missionary fruitfulness.

I greet you in the name of Mother and of the sisters of the Council. Feel us in communion with you in our commitment to witness and to propose to the young, the beauty of our vocation. May our Helper multiply her daughters for the life and the future of young people.

With great affection,

Rome 31 January 2010

Sr. Emilia Musatti

N.B. Greetings for Mother may be sent to the General House or to the Provincial House of Madagascar. Thank you!

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