Superior General’s Message
“The journey towards holiness is made of small steps”
Very dear missionaries, very dear Sisters and Brothers,
The feast of the Consolata this year has a very special and particular tone, in fact it comes just after the Beatification of our Sister Irene Stefani held in Nyeri in Kenya on May 23rd and on the same day, there was also the celebration of the Beatification of Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. The two newly beatified missionaries accompany well the feast of the Consolata and make it even more important and universal. The two newly beatified join two continents, the African and the American, and give a missionary foundation to their self-giving which also becomes an expression of the universality of the Church. The Consolata and the two newly beatified, Irene and Romero, are a further invitation to take seriously the journey of holiness, as Pope Francis reminds us: “The journey towards holiness is made of small steps.”
In the great struggle to save life and thus protect love, nobody gives us greater courage than these friends who, for love’s sake, have given their life. The Saints, having exalted love to the point of shedding their blood, are truly our “rope masters”. They transfused into us their courage, their enthusiasm, their determination. And God knows, we do
have an urgent need, in these times of discouragement, weaknesses, if not of despair.
1. Sister Irene: “She participated in the joys, life and sorrows of the people!” a testimony of a man from Gikondi! She arrived in Kenya 100 years ago, January 1915, and, in a journey of just 39 years, she died on the Kikuyu hills of the plague, a disease contracted by visiting a sick person. A short life of total dedication, without reservation, to the family, the parish, the Institute of the Consolata Missionaries and the missionary activity.
Nyaatha, mother of mercy, was the most common name by which the people of Nyeri Kikuyu called Sr. Irene. The proverbial charity of this missionary remained engraved in the memory of the people who appreciated not only her charitable acts that she did, but also the maternally attitude that she showed. Bernard Mugambi, a witness of that time, says: “She was called with the name Nyaatha which means: Mother of mercy. Many people, both near and far from the mission, knew her only by that name: Nyaatha”.
Her charity was from far away. Immediately after her religious profession made in the hands of Allamano, on January 29, 1914, she wrote in a notebook her program of life: “Only Jesus. All with Jesus. Nothing from me. All of Jesus. Nothing of me. All for Jesus. Nothing for me. I shall love charity more than my very self ”. It is the proclamation for us how the living love of Jesus and of the brothers can be welded in unity and become flesh in our life, up to transform it. Amazed, doctors of the military hospitals in Dar-es-Salaam said “That creature is not a woman, she is an angel” and the people of Gikondi confirm it: “she was mware mwendi ando, the Sister who loves everybody”. “Visiting the sick, the poor, baptizing the sick and taking care of them was her daily work. In fact, she used to travel long distances going up and down steep trails looking for these poor people. She did not take even one minute of rest because she was completely dedicated to this people” (Joseph Macharia from Gichuru).
Her being mother of mercy was also her inspiring principle of her missionary method, and it can be also for us today, in a world in need of tenderness and closeness. “When she saw one in pain, she was taken by compassion and wept and tried to do all she could to help him. Many came to the mission to confide their sufferings because she was the mother of all” (Bernard Mugambi). She consoled with her presence, she cured the sick, she went to seek out the poor, always close to those who wept, giving herself as a sacrifice pleasing to God. “Participated in the joys, in the life and sorrows of the people” (Martino Wang’Ondu) and she knew well their language. “She was very good, she prayed God a lot, she loved her neighbour, she was a woman of sacrifice because we walked on foot all day, coming home in the evening. She did not despise anyone, she loved all” (Pancrazio Gathirwa).
She was a strong woman, with a gentle attitude. Several witnesses remember her as strong, generous, steady, fearless and determined, zealous in her work. She was meek, she walked quickly to lose no time, she was friendly when she spoke to people. Mercy and consolation were the way used by her to bring Jesus and witness his gospel. It is known to all how she had special care for catechesis, the Christian teaching and above all baptism, considered by her as the greatest gift a missionary could give. “Whenever a child was born she used to go and offer her best wishes or be of assistance to the woman herself. I remember that when Marta had troubles in delivering the twins she assisted her and when they were born she took them in her arms, saying happily: “Let us thank God who has chosen me to see these creatures who will be baptized and become sons of God” (Martino Wang’Ondu).
Irene is also for us a model in the supreme moment of life, when death comes near and our return to the Father is at hand. Dying for love, like Jesus, is her teaching for us. “I, Pancrazio Gathirwa, knew well Sister Irene Stefani in the mission of Gikondi in the years 1920-1930. When she came to us I was here, and when she died I was still here: that is, we were with her until she died. She caught the deadly disease in the village Mbari ya Ndumbe here in Gikondi, where she had gone to cure Julius Ngari, suffering from plague”. She cared for him with love, this teacher who had created serious problems to her in the school, and because of this she died, like Jesus turning her death into an act of love. She was only 39 years old. Love “forces” him who is loved to love in return!
Ending I like to remember what our Blessed Allamano insistently repeated: “The more we want to be missionaries, the more we must be convinced that to be so in fact it is required a holiness that is “special, also heroic and extraordinary in some occasions to the point of making miracles” (Conf. I, page 617).
2. Bishop Oscar Romero: “He said the truth. He defended the poor. That is why they killed him!” a testimony of a peasant. A Bishop considered “conservative” and placed at the head of the Diocese of El Salvador from February 3, 1977 to March 24, 1980, killed on the altar while celebrating Holy Mass. A short time as a bishop, lived close to his people, especially the poor who have transformed him into an evangelical prophet, voice of the last, “Revolutionary Bishop”.
A major impact in the international opinion was the signature that Pope Francesco put in the decree stipulating that Archbishop Romero, head of the Diocese of San Salvador, was killed on March 24, 1980, “in hatred of the faith” and therefore he is a martyr. His murder took place during the celebration of the Eucharist. Masterminds were the oligarchies and the political power of that time. Immediately, for the poor people of El Salvador and throughout Latin America, he was Saint Romero of America. A seal on the fact that his sacrifice was a real martyrdom in the fight for justice and the liberation of the poor.
The Church thus recognizes a martyr of the Latin American Church, that of Salvador. He thus becomes a “Father of the Church” in Latin America.
Many bishops of that immense continent in the last 60 years, not to mention the precursors, as Bartolomeo de Las Casas that in the year 500 fought for the dignity of the Indians against the Spanish and Portuguese domination, have built with their testimony, for some of them to the ultimate sacrifice, the Church in Latin America. In this way, this Church becomes a protagonist of the History of the Church. Many are the names of these fathers: dom Helder Camara, dom Manuel Larrain, dom Enrique Angelleli, dom Luis Proaño, dom Evaristo Arns, dom Aloisio Lorscheider, dom Samuel Ruiz, Dom Luciano Mendes. Just to mention a few of them.
The theological and pastoral turning point takes place with the Assembly of CELAM in Medellin in 1968. That meeting which took place in the immediate post-council period took to heart the situation of oppression of the poor; its key words were: preferential option for the poor, justice and liberation. A turning point for what not long ago was considered a “colonial” Church. Of course, the path after Medellin met the resistance of the Roman Curia and of standardization. But the seed of Medellin has continued to bear fruit with the liberation theology, the grassroots communities and the struggle of countless witnesses of the faith.
In this vein the life and witness of Oscar Romero are situated. El Salvador in the eighties was dominated by land oligarchies and violent military men. There were the “death squads”, real gangs of criminals in the pay of the powerful, which made massacres of innocent victims among the farmers and anyone who defended the rights of the poor. Among them was Msgr. Romero. As everyone knows Oscar Romero was chosen as head of the Diocese of San Salvador because he was considered a “conservative”. Instead his heart of Shepherd, confronted with the poverty of the people, had a radical conversion, taking the side of the poor and of all those who worked for the poor.
His conversion took place on account of the murder, at the hands of the coffee producers oligarchs, of Father Rutilio Grande. “The bandages fell from the eyes of Monsignor and he converted”, thus the Jesuit Theologian Jon Sobrino beautifully wrote (Magazine Concilium 5/2009). From there began the continuous projection towards the pastoral and theological turn of the Salvadoran Church. The Church of the Poor, the grassroots communities and organizations for human rights. He denounced relentlessly the political, economic oppression of the political and military power against the people of El Salvador: “included among the oppressed the Church should and could be medicine to heal the negative by-products of the struggle” ( J. Sobrino). A Church yeast that leavens the spirit of the Gospel in society. But also a Church of martyrs: “Monsignor Romero has favoured a Church of “liberation”, which presupposes the historical incarnation in the struggle for justice, for the fundamental rights of the people. It could not be the Church of the poor and abandon them to their fate. The fact that it was a “struggle”, with its ambiguity, it did not block him” (J. Sobrino).
Oligarchies threw at him slanders of every kind. But he, taking seriously God and the reality as a biblical prophet, denounced the great evil that plagued El Salvador, that is: “wealth, private property as an untouchable absolute. And woe to anyone who touches this high voltage wire! It gets burned.” Or in a homily he stated: “It is inconceivable that someone may declare himself a Christian and he does not take, like Christ, a preferential option for the poor. It is a scandal that Christians today criticize the Church because it thinks “in
favor” of the poor. This is not Christianity! […] Many, very dear brothers, believe that when the Church says “in favor of the poor”, it is becoming communist, it is doing politics, it is opportunistic. It is not so, because this has always been its doctrine. […] We say to all: Let us take seriously the cause of the poor, as if it were our own cause, or even more, as in effect it is the cause of Jesus Christ.”
In his last homily he knew he had to die when, the day before, in the cathedral, he said: «I would like to make a plea in a special way to the men of the army, and in concrete to the bases of the National Guard, of the police and of the barracks. Brothers, who are part of our own people, you kill your own brothers peasants! While faced with an order given to a man to kill, what must prevail is the law of God who says: “Do not kill”! No soldier is obliged to obey an order that goes against the law of God. An immoral law, nobody is obliged to observe it. It is time for you to resume your conscience and obey your conscience rather than the law of sin. The Church, a supporter of the rights of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot stay silent before such abomination. In the name of God and in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise up every day more tumultuous up to heaven, I beg you, I pray you, I order you: stop the repression!”.
“It is a providential fact that this beatification comes with the pontificate of the first Latin American Pope”, that it may take place “in a time of great historic hardship, representing a faith that does not remain in the principles, but it chooses to get its hands dirty with the poorest, to show that God is on their side” ( Mons. Paglia, Postulator of the Cause of Beatification).
Truly, as Ignacio Ellacuria affirmed (he, too, a Jesuit martyr in Salvador), “with Monsignor Romero God has passed through El Salvador”.
3. We missionaries: consecrated for the mission in holiness of life!
The Church, with the gift of the Second Vatican Council, helped us understand that all Christians, as baptized, are equal in dignity before God and are united by the same vocation, which is the one to holiness (cfr. Const. Lumen Gentium, 39-42). Even our Founder, Joseph Allamano, made it his major theme. But what is this universal vocation to be saints? And how can we achieve it, being inspired by these two blessed given to us by the Church?
First of all we must have in mind that holiness is not something that we get on our own, that we get with our quality and our ability. Holiness is a gift, it is the gift that the Lord Jesus gives us, when He takes us with him and clothes us of himself, making us like him. In the Letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul says that “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her to make her holy” (Eph. 5,25-26). Here, holiness is truly the most beautiful face of the Church: rediscovering itself in communion with God, in the fullness of his life and his love. It is understandable, then, that holiness is not the prerogative of only a few: holiness is a gift that is offered to all, without exception, and therefore it is the distinctive character of every Christian. We all are called to become holy: “Many times, we are tempted to think that holiness is granted only to those who have the opportunity to break away from the ordinary chores, devoting himself continuously to prayer. But it is not so! Some people think that holiness is to close the eyes and make a face like that of a little holy image, no that is not the holiness; holiness is something greater, deeper that God gives us. Indeed, it is living with love and offering one’s own Christian testimony in the occupations of every day that we are called to become saints” (Pope Francis).
As people consecrated for the mission we are called to be holy by living joyfully our donation, our ministry and our commitment to building the Kingdom of God in peace and in justice, in solidarity with people of good will for another possible world. To be holy by becoming visible sign of the love of God and his presence with us. It is God who gives the grace! The only thing the Lord asks is that we may be in communion with Him and serve our brothers.
“Each of us can do a some soul-searching and respond within himself. How have we so far responded to the Lord’s call to holiness? Do I want to become a bit better? To be more a Christian? This is the way of holiness. When the Lord calls us to be saints, he is not calling us to something heavy and sad, not at all! It is an invitation to share his joy, to live and to offer with joy every moment of our lives, making it also a gift of love for the people around us. If we understand this, everything changes and takes on a new meaning, a beautiful meaning, starting with the little things of every day. Many small steps toward holiness! Every step toward holiness will make us better people, free from selfishness and closing in on ourselves, and open up to the brothers and their needs” (Pope Francis).
Dear missionaries, in the First Letter of Peter this exhortation is given us: “Let each one live according to the gifts he has received, employing it for one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. He who speaks, let it be as with words of God; if anyone ministers, let him do it with the strength that comes from God, so that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (4, 10-11). Here is the call to holiness that our blessed ones: Irene and Romero, together with our Founder Allamano propose to us for our times! Let us welcome it with joy and let us support one another, because the path to holiness it is not done alone. Each one by himself cannot do it, but it is done together, in that one body which is the Church, loved and sanctified by the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us go forward with courage on this way of holiness!
Thanks, Happy Feast day, courage and ahead in Domino!
Questions for our reflection:
1. How have I received the news of the beatification of Sister Irene and of Mons. Oscar Romero?
2. What are the lessons that these two blessed transmit to my life? What did I learn from their example?
3. What guidelines and practical decisions am I willing to take for my present life?
Fr. Stefano Camerlengo
Father General
Rome, June 20, 2015.