With a purified heart towards the 150th anniversary of the FMA Institute

Rome (Italy). On 25 July 2022, the Community of Mary Help of Christians Generalate (RCG), in Rome, experienced a penitential Celebration in preparation for 5 August 2022, the solemn date of the 150^th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians.

“Mornese: regenerating water for the spiritual life of every generation of FMA” is the title of the Celebration, proposed by the Liturgical Group with the awareness that such an important Jubilee event is a time of grace, praise, and renewal, but it must also be prepared with the request for personal and community forgiveness, which opens the heart to receive greater gifts.

As Don Bosco left said to his children, “I sketch, you will fill in the colors”, every FMA guards the gift and responsibility of making her contribution to the whole picture.

In introducing the Word of God, the Guide then proclaims: “We are the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. With this sense of belonging, we enter in the request for forgiveness for the limitations and errors that we have committed in our history by distancing ourselves from our being educators who evangelize and evangelizers who educate”.

The Celebration is also part of the context of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Journey to Canada, which he defined as a penitential pilgrimage undertaken by the Church, to contribute to the path of healing and reconciliation with the local indigenous peoples.

Memory and reconciliation, these are precisely the words highlighted by the Holy Father in his first discourses as soon as he arrived in Edmonton, Canada, “… now I am in your home, as a friend and pilgrim; I am in your land, in the temple where you come to praise God as brothers and sisters. (…) And at the same time, we must not forget that even in the Church, the weeds are mixed with good wheat. Even in the Church. And precisely because of these weeds, I wanted to undertake this penitential pilgrimage, and to begin it this morning by remembering the evil suffered by the indigenous peoples from so many Christians and asking for forgiveness with sorrow”.

In the penitential Celebration, the request for forgiveness for the missing responses to the Charism is followed by a time of silence and reflection on one’s personal response to each call, in comparison with some articles of the Constitutions of the FMA Institute, as a call to make them more and more current and vital, to love them as the “pact of our Covenant with God”, as a project of life that directs and sustains our vocation and is a sure guide to Holiness.

In Circular no. 1019, Mother Chiara Cazzuola indicates Holiness to the FMA, which according to Saint Paul VI, “explains the extraordinary fruitfulness of the past and ensures vitality for the future” (cf. Appendix Constitutions, 295), as a personal and community priority commitment, also underlined by Saint John Paul II, at the audience granted to the FMA participating in GC XXI, on 8 November 2002:

“Such an urgent mission requires an incessant personal and community conversion. Only hearts totally open to the action of grace are able to interpret the signs of the times and to grasp the appeals of humanity in need of justice and peace.”

The FMA of the Generalate Community lived the penitential moment that ended with a gesture of repentance and with confessions, in an atmosphere of recollection and prayer. The General Council also participated in the Celebration, which valued this significant way of preparing the heart for the Jubilee event of the 150^th anniversary of the FMA Institute.

Text of the Penitential Celebration

The General Secretariat also proposes  an outline for the liturgy of 5 August prepared by Sr. Elena Massimi, FMA of St. John Bosco Province (IRO).