Online encounter missionaries ad gentes

Rome (Italy). On 26 March 2022, Sr. Ruth del Pilar Mora, Councilor for the Missions of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, and the Sector Collaborators met online with the FMA missionaries ad gentes from all over the world.

In the months preceding the encounter, 580 FMA who live and work in the mission lands were contacted. On 26 March, 250 sisters from 61 countries in Asia, Oceania, Africa, Europe, and America were present online.

The objectives of the meeting were: to meet and get to know each other, to welcome Sr. Ruth to the new mission that God entrusted to her during GCXXIV, and to create synodal synergy to live the mission ad gentes with renewed passion.

The FMA Institute is characterized by missionary passion from its very beginning. The evangelizing concern of Don Bosco and Mother Mazzarello fueled the apostolic zeal of the first FMA community of Mornese from which, in 1877, just five years after the foundation of the Institute, the first missionary expedition to Uruguay departed. Since then, it has been an uninterrupted succession of thousands of extraordinary stories of charity, written with life in unknown and distant places.

In the letter of convocation to the missionaries ad gentes, the Sector included the image of Don Bosco’s world map. One of the most moving objects of the Rooms of Don Bosco in Turin-Valdocco is a small dark globe, somewhat imprecise, on which the borders between the Nations are hardly distinguishable and the world appears merged into a compact solidarity.

It is the globe that Don Bosco examined with his first collaborators. There, together with the Founders, the horizons of every Daughter of Mary Help of Christians, of every Salesian of Don Bosco, and of all the members of the Salesian Family are broadened. The motivation for being missionaries here and now is still the da mihi animas coetera tolle.

In the opening greeting to the Sisters, the Councilor for the Missions underlined the aspect of solidarity which, in situations of serious humanitarian emergency, unleashes an eloquent story of charity made up of concrete gestures. Sr. Ruth took up the three guidelines of commitment, the priority choices of GC XXIV, highlighting in particular:

Being a PRESENCE that generates LIFE, which is played out in vocational solidity, where the Lord calls us to work with the spectrum of the world. The Institute has embarked on the path of renewal, helping us to nourish the vocational mentality.

From this experience flows missionary synodality, the ability to grasp the fascination of Jesus in others. This broad gaze allows us to feel ourselves all in the same boat, to see a brother, a sister in the other, to take care of and to travel the road together.

This time we are living requires of us a rapid ecological conversion and to assume the paradigm of integral ecology with determination and immediately, which requires us to deepen a spirituality in which everything and everyone is included. Every choice we make along this line has an educational responsibility for all young people, the poor, and the cries of the earth”.

Sr. Ciri Hernandez, Councilor for the missions from 1996 to 2008, who is temporarily at the Generalate in Rome, joined the meeting to give a joyful greeting to the missionaries.

In concluding, Sr. Ruth spoke of the experience of study and deepening on the missionary dimension of the FMA Institute together with Mother and the Sisters of the Council during the plenum, for which they all feel co-responsible. She asked for prayers for the 9 new FMA missionaries who continue the process of missionary discernment, in particular at this time of the Spiritual Exercises in Mornese.

There was a lively interaction by the participants made up of intergenerational listening between missionaries of different ages and experiences. The reactions to the event were positive, with expressions of gratitude for this family moment which, thanks to the social media, provided the possibility to shorten distances and, on the 150th anniversary of the Foundation of the FMA Institute, strengthened the motivations and the desire to continue the journey with daring, resourcefulness, and creativity together with the peoples to whom God sends them.