Rome (Italy). A few days after the anniversary of the death of Mother Catherine Daghero, which occurred on 26 February 1924, the collection of her letters is published in two volumes at the Palumbi publishing house. The published work, “Catherine Daghero Superior General of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians – Letters”, edited by Maria Concetta Ventura, FMA, is a further enrichment of the knowledge of this Superior, neglected for too long.
After the edition of the “Diary on the occasion of the first trip to America of the Superior General Sr. Catherine Daghero (1895-97)”, this publication of the 1,260 letters to FMA, former students, Salesian superiors, civil and ecclesiastical authorities, laity allows us to meet this second Superior General of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians in the richness of her personality and her long government.
The epistolary genre is probably what best reveals the person. Mother Caterina, of course, did not even imagine that, at a certain time, these letters could be published.
In her long or short letters, she addresses the recipient simply and directly; she tries to meet them through common interests, and often, when writing to an FMA, she takes care to reach her in the richness of her call to be part of the living monument of the Institute, to help her reflect its charism better and better, resounds with the exhortation to holiness, repeats that she must become a saint, indeed “a big saint”! At the same time, she shows interest about her health, family, apostolic activity. She gives and asks for news, works to nourish the sense of belonging, communicating what can make it grow: Vestitions and Professions, opening houses, diseases and deaths, missionary departures.
What she writes, while reflecting concrete situations, historical times different from ours, has a resonance also on current readers. There are attentions, values, openings that do not know limits of time and place. To take these volumes in hand today is like having found the maternal correspondence and approach it with emotion for what it reveals about her, as Mother Chiara Cazzuola highlights in the presentation of the work:
“We can affirm that the letters clearly express the particular value of ‘taking care’ of each and every one, with the tenderness and firmness of a motherhood lived in the spirit of the origins with incredible energy and love.”
The letters to the superiors and authorities help to retrace important and delicate moments in the history of the Institute, to understand how some events, some choices marked the life, hopes, expectations of those who lived them in first person. It helps us to see how Providence has acted to lead a nascent Institute through ways that could have been seen as risky, to what it has become today. They thus become an invitation not to fear when history asks us to change, to respond to new needs, to continue to be obedient to the Church, and attentive to the calls of the youth world.
The work was presented on 19 March 2025, in the context of the del Study Conference “Catherine Daghero, Superior General in the Salesian style” promoted by the Study Center of the «Auxilium» Faculty in Rome.
