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The third means proposed by Madeleine Sophie for glorifying the Heart of Jesus is the work of retreats, the fourth, contacts with people outside our communities.
The Chapter of 1994 states that today fidelity to our charism calls us to be women of communion.
I share my pastoral mission by bringing together these two elements.
I collaborate full time at national level with the Service for Community Animation of the Movement for a Better World, founded in 1952 by Fr Riccardo Lombardi SJ. This Service aims at maintaining the Church in a rhythm of on-going renewal, by reading the signs of the times and by pursuing an ever more complete unity, only passion of the Heart of Jesus: “Father, may they be one as You and I are One”.. The Movement does this concretely at the level of the local Church - parish and diocese- and of religious life, mainly the congregations of apostolic life.
As I participate full time in this Service, I live two community realities. My religious community is that of the Villa Lante, in Rome, while priests, religious and lay persons with whom I share my daily life are my community of mission. My religious community, although I do not live there all the time, is the source of my mission: it “sends” me each day, and opens me to the provincial community and to the life of the whole Society.
The community of mission, with its “team-style” and its “provisional” character, offers me and in-depth experience of the meaning of an apostolic community, a community which expresses its ideal and makes it concrete form though goals that enable it to attain the ideal. For this reason, the community is organized with definite roles and tasks. So, when I take on a responsibility, a service, I am not alone even if I do it by myself: others are responsible with me, we have prepared together and I act in the name of the group, sustained by their interest and prayer. The ‘provisional character’ means that no one is a permanent in the group, but remains bound to his/her original community and returns to it when discernment and obedience say the time has come. This ‘provisional character’ does not allow us to “sit” on results but asks of me an attitude of availability and pursuit of the “magis”, of a communion that is always wider and deeper; it gradually frees me from myself and enables me to grow as person-in-community.
My life alternates times of prayer-reflection-research, as a team, in order to discover in the signs of the times - the main trends of history, where the Lord is leading his people, and by which concrete ways to implement His Will.
To contemplate the world in and through the Heart of Christletting the world set its agenda (Chapter 1994).
To know and love the Heart of Christ where He lives and suffers, and to look for ways so that God’s people, Hs Church, may discover and experience this love, a love that is always searching for and drawing us.
A second component of my life is that of courses-encounters given in order to communicate what we discover continuously, and searching for ways to express this discovery concretely in a way of life. These encounters are oriented to parishes (parish priests, laity, religious) and dioceses (bishops, clergy, religious, laity); or to specific categories of the people of God: youth, families, pastoral workers, priests, bishops… no one is excluded. The methodology is that of progressive concretization, eventually enabling each baptized person to become a multiplier. The journey of evangelisation is the Catechumenate of a baptized people.
Did you ever have to lead a retreat for a group of Bishops and Episcopal vicars? For me this is always a deep experience. But even ”greater” (and this makes me feel very small, a mere instrument in God’s hands) is to sit with the pastoral team of a diocese or a parish, and to accompany them in the drawing up of the Diocesan Pastoral Plan: living a whole week each year, sharing their work, accompanying their discernment!
The third component of my work makes me travel from one diocese to another, one parish to another, one congregation to another, in order to pray, to reflect, to draw up a programme, to evaluate, to search together for specific solutions – all of this, without preconceived formulas but as a fruit of sharing the spirituality of communion proper to the Church.
The core element, daily, whatever the commitment I am living at one moment, is the celebration, in community prayer and liturgy, of God’s tender care of humanity, a God who continually calls us by name and shapes us for communion… and of the response of love of His Church, beyond and through its weaknesses and limits.
Thus an ordinary day begins with Lauds in community. and concludes with the Eucharist, where we share the experience of God lived during the day, giving an ever new flavour to the Word and to the Bread..
In this way I find myself fully RSCJ, given to the Church and the world, as an educator at the service of the people of God.
Antonella Apolloni rscj
Province of Italy
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