Our Plenary Council in Rome is coming to a close, and undoubtedtly, the highlight of these two weeks was last weekend when our Sisters were received at the Vatican by Pope Leo XIV, together with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
They entered that audience as women already in conversation – about responsibility, about direction, about what one hundred and fifty years of mission means at this moment in our congregation. This Jubilee is not decorative for us, it is pressing on decisions. Decisions on what continues, what must deepen, and what must be relinquished.
In his address, the Pope did not speak first about structures or expansion. He spoke about source, the ground of Religious life. The Eucharist. Prayer. Listening to the Word. The shared life that flows from these. Religious life, he reminded us, cannot be sustained by activity alone. Mission thins when it loses its interior ground.
Around that hall were our Sisters whose daily work includes teaching in overcrowded classrooms, sitting beside hospital beds, accompanying women facing violence, meeting families displaced by conflict, sustaining parish communities where resources are thin. The language of “source” touched the reality we know. It named what keeps us living our faith under strain.
Pope Leo spoke directly of the indispensable presence of women in mission, as constitutive of the Church’s life. For a congregation founded in 1876 on that conviction, those words met our history. Fr Augustine Planque insisted from the beginning that women were central to mission, and that claim has shaped us for generations.
His address also also remembered those who came before us. Sisters who crossed continents, who learned languages slowly and imperfectly, who endured illness, isolation, and in some cases violent death. Their lives remain part of our congregation’s living memory as we sit at the table today.
As our Council draws to a close, this encounter will remain with us as orientation during our Jubilee year, an invitation to keep listening for the voice that first called us here, and above all a grace that asks only that we remain open to where it might yet lead.
Your will find the Vatican Article here: Pope to religious: Be a reflection of God’s love in the world
