Over the past few months, our Communications Team had the opportunity to spend a few days with the community of the Sisters of Codogno. A great gift!
We arrived in a community where the wounds from the loss of many Sisters to Covid-19 were still fresh. Yet, at the same time, we were able to experience how Mother Cabrini’s charism and her love for the Heart of Jesus is alive and active: in the Sisters’ love for the Eucharist, in their joy of sharing, even in fatigue and illness, in the intelligence of love with which they carry out their mission through daily duties, and in their utmost care for all.
“Thank you for how you share the mission with us” are the words we received, and with which we returned to our daily tasks. We felt this thanks was addressed to all of us lay collaborators and sharers of the charism. A question continues to accompany us during these weeks, and we share it with you who are reading: what does it mean for me, a lay collaborator who shares the charism, to live the mission with the Sisters? To be close to each other; to make us closer to those who are more ‘far away’, not only geographically.
It is with this in mind that, over recent months, we have renewed our website, and with this newsletter we are also inaugurating a new look for our quarterly bulletin.
We would really like Communication within the Institute to be more and more an instrument for sharing among us, and for uniting our voices. Voices that, when shared, become louder and whose echoes resonate farther afield. We will still continue to challenge ourselves on important issues that the international world is calling to our attention, through means such as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (healthcare, zero hunger, fair access to vaccines, environmental sustainability), and, in the face of which, our faith does not allow us to remain inert.
We will continue to talk about the contribution that our Cabrinian world is already making every day to the achievement of many of these goals (e.g. with migrants and refugees, impact investing, health, education, support for the vulnerable).
It was with this same purpose in mind that, in the past few months, we asked all the lay collaborators of the Cabrinian world to express their closeness and thanks to all the Sisters (Watch the video and read the journal HERE). And they were delighted to receive so much feedback from all of you collaborators. We never cease to say ‘thank you’ for the great witness and richness that you have given, contributing to our global communication efforts.
Fr. Paul Molinari SJ wrote about the relationship of Mother Cabrini and the Sisters with the migrants: “from their first meeting with those ‘angels’ who spoke their language and understood them, [the migrants] considered the houses of the Sisters […] as a center for their lives, as the family in which they found that warmth and affection of which they had been deprived”.
In the midst of the suffering that we are currently experiencing throughout the world, we are grateful to feel that we are part of the same Voice, which unites us and rises up in favor of the weakest, and is continually fed by the Heart of Jesus that repairs each of our hearts.
Tatiana Paradiso and Giulia Angelucci
on behalf of the Communications Team