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PREPARATION
TO THE GENERAL CHAPTER 2006
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Last
March 4, issued a call to the Congregation to gather in Chapter
preparation and
prayer, united by the theme : «Women Disciples of th Risen One,
with a Passion for a New
World» At that moment, we took our inspiration from the lives
of Gospel women who broke open the silence of death and the tomb
and who with their lives shouted to the world
the incredible news of the Resurrection on Jesus Christ. Those
women are still here wich us :
women of
Bethlehem
and
Nazareth, of Jerusalem and
Samaria, of
Bethany
and
Golgotha,
women of
Corinth
and
Ephesus
and
Antioch
and
Rome.
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They are followed by a «multitude» of Sisters of Charity of
St.Louis : Mother St.Louis and
her early companions. Mother Marie Fidele and all the prophets
who have risen among us
since 1803, the foundresses and re-foundresses of Provinces and
Vice-Province, our
living saints and our saints in glory, women known and unknown
who have enfleshed Jesus
Christ and who are birthing the new word that is our passion today.
You are these women,
and I thank you for your ardent commitment to being women disciples of th Risen One!
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I thank you for your dedication to the unfolding of the General
Chapter during these past
nine months of gestation and preparation. I thank you for your
participation in the
Reflection/Prayer Groups and for the clarity and depth of your
responses to the statement.
«We are Women Who…»
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PRIORITIES
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I thank you for your creativity and your fruitful work in the
Provincial/Vice Provincial
Chapters, work that inspired «Priorities» for our future.
These Priorities expose our
congregational hunger for a growth in understanding of our
identity and the sense of our
life in community ; they stimulate us anew for our SCSL mission
in the world and church.
It is with deep confidence in all of you, as vital members of
the Congretation, that I urge
you to continue the research, reflection, dialogue already begun
on these Priorities.
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UPDATE
ON OUR CONSTITUTIONS
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I
thank you for your love of the Congregation which you
manifested in a unique and
transformative manner through our serious efforts to update our
Constitutions. Your
initiatives will enlighten the members of the General Chapter in
their mandate to study,
evaluate, and approve a final edition of the text in July.
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Sisters, may the spirit and heart of Mother St-Louis
continue to lift us up, to give us joy,
and to empower us for journey ahead so that the new world for
which we truly long, will be
the world redeemed by Christ, the world that Christ envisioned,
and a world that expresses Christ. [...]
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PARTICIPATION
TO THE CHAPTER
Contemplation
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Each Sister of Charity of St. Louis is called especially through her prayer. Nothing is
more important for the life of the
Chapter and the ongoing vitality of the Congregation than our
daily fidelity to Jesus Christ
which find its source in our immersion in him. Nothing is more
essential to that immersion
than our contemplative prayer and our contemplative life-stance.
[...]
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Transformation
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Jesus Christ has that power to transform. Each moment of Christ,
experienced in Advent,
Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, speaks of
transformation: expectation to
reality, heaven to earth, divine to human, bread to body, wine
to blood, sin to conversion,
death to life, cross to resurrection, slavery to freedom, doubt
to faith, despair to hope, fear
to courage, silence to prophecy, seclusion to proclamation,
timidity to fire, many to one!
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Jesus came to earth to redeem it and transform it for all
time. Our Christian faith is based
on that transformation. To the extent that we contemplate Christ
the Redeemer in the varied
facets of God become human and in «the depths of God’s
richness, wisdom and knowledge.» to that extent will we
participate in the transformation of the world, will we
collaborate powerfully and passionately and daily as Jesus'
disciples in his creation of a
new world, will we move «gracefully» from mystery to mystery,
breathing Jesus' name and
being Jesus' face iwe n our world.
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It is grace that precedes us, that envelops us, and that beckons
us forward now. May we
accept that grace of Jesus in the totality for this Paschal
Mystery, the grace which
he has bequeathed to us, as a heritage to his beloved friends.
Let us immerse ourselves in
Jesus Christ until our entire existence is contemplative, until our «ordinary
lives» become «paschal lives»
in communion with the Risen One.
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May the mysteries which we will live each day as we journey to
the General Chapter, compel us to an ever deeper and more loving contemplation of
Christ in his experience of
life, death and resurrection. I call us to pray continually,
personally and communally, for such individual and congregational transformation. Together, may
we experience the
essence of our being as Sisters of Charity of St.Louis in
an authentic passion for a new
world in Christ!
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Through the prayer of Mother St.Louis, our contemplative
and passionate model, may
Christ the Redeemer grant us an abundance of grace and life!
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Geraldine
Hagel, s.c.s.l.
Supérieure générale
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