Paola Paoli rscj, province of Italy

With friends and the community of Miano, Naples

Paola in her social minsitry

Paola with Kim Young-Ae and Chabe García in Naples

On the day of final profession, May 27, 2007

I am the younger of two daughters from a family with little interest in religion. Nevertheless I have always had an inward desire to help in the building of a better world and to share life with those on the margins. For that reason, on leaving school, I decided to become a factory worker and to work alongside those least favoured by society. I joined the Workers’ unions in the factory and took part in all the strikes and demonstrations. These were wonderful, intense years when we struggled together sharing common values and ideals. As time passed I began to feel tired and empty within.

As a result of my father’s illness I visited hospitals a lot, and felt drawn to working there. So I decided to study again and become a nurse. I thought that this profession, and its way of helping others, could be a way of filling my inner emptiness, which continued to grow during these years.

In order to study I had to move to another town where I made new friends.  Amongst those I got to know were people who were very committed in the church. Thus began a time of questions, doubts, anxieties on the subject of religion, which both attracted and frightened me at the same time. Taking the advice of a close friend I decided to spend a few days in a hermitage in Umbria (in Gubbio, near to Assisi, and not far from my house), far from everyone and close to God.

These were wonderful days of prayer, silence and nature, where I met the Lord and felt deep within the desire to follow him. I think that for me the moment of conversion and of vocation were simultaneous.  

When the Lord came into my life I realised that my conversion only had meaning in a total offering of my life to him. My journey to the Society of the Sacred Heart had already been long but I have always had companions at my side who have helped me spiritually.

By then I was already working as a nurse, but I left it all to spend some time as a hermit. After some months that changed my life, and moved also by the news of the difficulties Italy was undergoing, I came down from the mountain. I did not want to go back to my family and my previous life, but I needed to work.   Since I also wanted to share the lot of the poorest I decided to work as a peasant picking tobacco. It was very hard work, bent double under the sun from 7 a.m. till 7 p.m., with just a short rest for lunch.

My fellow workers were African men or very poor Italian women who, at the end of a hard day’s work, went home to their families to do housework, and then get up very early to leave food prepared for their family.

These women, angry with God and life, often used foul language, but also had the ability to care for and help each other mutually and freely. Here I began to understand that the Lord places less importance on outward things and looks at the heart rather than words.

With time we became very good friends, and knowing as they did, a little of my inward journey they began to want to pray together, showing a deep inward desire for God. This clarified for me what the specific call of my vocation. I discovered that my deepest desire was to witness to God’s Love to those whose experience of God was not that of Love, and who need others to reveal that God is very close to them.

After this I had other experiences up until I decided to do the Spiritual Exercises with a Jesuit who is a good friend of the society of the Sacred Heart. Thus I arrived at the Villa Lante!

By chance I read the documents of Chapter ’94 which had just finished. They made a deep impression on me, and when I read “The Eucharistic dimension of our Spirituality” I felt that I had at last found what I had been looking for: the opportunity to live out a deeply contemplative life with a strong social commitment. I entered as a postulant in January 1995.

The first few years were difficult because of the illness and death of my parents, but with the help of God and other people that God put in my way, I was able to continue. These were years of joy and of pain, working in contexts of great deprivation with immigrants; women forced into prostitution; AIDS sufferers, and child victims, both boys and girls, of sexual abuse. Sometimes it has not been easy to cope with the weight of so much suffering, and I have felt powerless and useless. Studying Social Education as a Young Professed helped me to cope better with some situations.

I firmly believe that in every context, and with each person we are able to live the Society’s charism “To Discover and Reveal Love”, and this is both necessary and important. But I believe that it even more necessary in some contexts and situations. I have had the experience that for me it is easier to discover and reveal Love there where apparently it is less visible, in deprivation, in suffering. During these years I have realised that I have changed my understanding of living contemplation: before I thought that one could contemplate God only in silence, in nature, in beautiful things…now I contemplate him above all in people.

What I try to live is well expressed in the picture of the washing of the feet by Sieger Köder. There the Face of Jesus is only seen in reflection in the dirty water with which Jesus washes the feet. In recent years I have lived close to people whose lives do not easily reflect the presence of God. But these same lives, often seemingly destroyed, are the dirty water where the reflection of Jesus can be seen, and I can only see it if my life is “founded on prayer and the Interior Life”.

After a time full of blessings in Chile , and in Probation, I have returned to Italy, to Naples and a new ministry. I now work in a hostel that welcomes women from abroad who are victims of violence.  At this moment we have 6 women and 2 children in the house: two are from Nigeria and they were forced into prostitution (one has a three month old son), a young Sri Lankan woman aged 20, who was abused by her father and imprisoned in the house for the past 5 years, two political refugees, one from Togo the other from Burkina Faso, and a Polish woman, 8 months pregnant with a child she does not want. because she was raped, She also has a 6 year-old son. Previously we have had women from Cuba, Morocco, Albania and the Ukraine. All are very different by race, religion, age and problems. What we offer is not just a bed and food but also we set up a personalized education project that gives them the possibility of becoming autonomous. At the same time we help them to learn Italian, and to get the papers that enable them to stay in the country, and to access medical services.

In all of this I am with them in a professional relationship that is above all that of a sister who wants to help them understand that there is a God (whatever their image and way of relating to him my be) who loves them with boundless love.