Borgonuovo, June 18, 2017

Solemnity of Corpus Domini

CALLING OF THE 9th ORDINARY GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE INSTITUTE

Dearest Missionaries and Volunteers,

with the sentiments of confidence and courage that were Marys, in this year that
marks the centenary of the apparitions of Fatima and the foundation of the Militia of
the Immaculata,

I convene the 9th Ordinary General Assembly of the Institute,

in accordance with Constitutions #136 and with the consent of the General
Council gathered on January 11-13, 2017.

It will be held from June 10 to 24, 2018, at the Central House of the Institute, in
the Auditorium San Massimiliano Kolbe at Borgonuovo, Sasso Marconi (Bologna).

The election of the General Directress will take place Saturday, June 16, 2018.
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A special time opens before us, that will lead us to the celebration of the 9th General

Assembly. I thought we should let ourselves be guided by Mary of Nazareth through some
Gospel scenes that offer us points for reflection and evaluation, both on a personal and
community level.

TRUST IN THE LORD WHO GUIDES HISTORY

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;

my spirit rejoices in God my savior.
For he has looked upon his handmaids lowliness;
behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed.
The Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him.
He has shown might with his arm,
dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart.
He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones
but lifted up the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things;
the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped Israel his servant,
remembering his mercy,
according to his promise to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever."(cf. Lk 1:46-55)

When we reach the end of an experience, a journey, or a powerful moment that marked our
lives, we make a balance, some sort of report showing the pros and cons, the good times and
the difficult ones, the people we met, the places we visited, and we ask ourselves, what do I
take with me?
We too have come to the end of a stage of the journey of the Institute. One of the attitudes I
would like to see accompanying us in this year in preparation for the Assembly is trust in the
Lord, who guided and guides our Family history and that of each of us. Trust that speaks of the
importance of trusting and entrusting. Trust that becomes abandonment and confidence. Trust
that becomes grateful remembrance of the journey we have completed and the events we have
lived through under God's fatherly and providential gaze.

We meet the young Mary of Nazareth, at the time when she raises her Magnificat song for
the great things God worked in her life. She, small, poor, humble, unknown to the great of the
earth, knows that the Lord entered her life and leads her on new and unexplored paths. Her
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words inspire hope and tell us that our joy comes from being amazed at what God does in us
and around us.
The Virgin of the Magnificat reminds us of the primacy of the contemplative dimension of
life, that continuous welcoming the initiative of the Lord, which means letting the Lord love
and gently lead us. With her, we rediscover prayer as a space that allows freedom from fear to
grow in us, and so courage and boldness of love, faithfulness to the people that God has
entrusted to us and to the situations in which He placed us.
We learn to be patient, as we wait for Gods times, not our time, and to follow God's ways,
which so often are not our ways. Most importantly, we are able to discover the many gifts of
the Beloved and give thanks to Him in all things.

An invitation and a mandate

I invite you, then, to remember, to retrace the steps of the last six years. The Lord visited us
in so many ways. He wrote with us pages of life and opened new horizons. He made us go
through the pain of losses and suffered fidelity to his will. He put in our hearts desires and
dreams that we shared and celebrated on the 60th anniversary of the birth of our Institute.

Write, sing, draw, or dance your Magnificat, so that every past experience may become
the fruitful seed of new life, true life, joyful life.
Make the contemplative gaze of Mary your own and, as so often Father Faccenda urged
us, "Live in contemplation and action. Not contemplation only, not action only: but one
beside the other, so that nothing would get lost in the vineyard of the Lord."1

THE COURAGE OF SEARCHING

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers,
listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at
his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and
his mother said to him, Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been
looking for you with great anxiety. And he said to them, Why were you looking for me?
Did you not know that I must be in my Fathers house? But they did not understand what
he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to
them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart (Lk 2:46-51).

We meet Mary of Nazareth on the paths of search when, in a moment of distress and anxiety,
gives voice to a question, Son, why have you done this? With Joseph, she talks about the pain
of loss and the anxiety of the search. Their anguish expresses their bewilderment, the fact that
they do not understand the choice and the words of Jesus. It is the suffering that always
accompanies the search journey, when it is not given to see what lies beyond the horizon and

1
OVS VIII, Contemplation-action in the Missionary, Bologna, June 29, 1989, p. 256.
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we need to wait and, in the meantime, look for answers, guesstimate the path, trust all the more
and always in God.
Search is an important component of human life. It is set in motion by the questions that
arise in the human heart and requires an ability to listen to themselves, others, ones own
times, and God. It seems interesting, in this regard, what a spirituality writer said:
A Jewish proverb says that in the beginning God created the question mark and placed it in
the human heart. We ought to stop and listen to the God of questions: no longer ask questions
to the Lord, but let Him ask questions to us. Instead of running at once to look for the answer,
stop and feel comfortable with the questions, the naked Gospel questions. Like the questions,
love the questions: they themselves are revelation.
We worry about how we can meet the Lord. Let us allow Him to enter into a relationship
with us, with his questions that encourage and challenge our life. We are creatures who
question and search, creatures of desire.
Love the questions; let them work within ourselves, like a conception. Answers define,
questions inspire. Definitions close off, questions invite you beyond. Questions are young, like
a lasting morning2.

I think we too ought to ask ourselves questions in order to respond more and better to the
expectations of the people of our time, in creative fidelity to the charism received as a gift.
Listen to the cry of the world, accept the challenges of history, welcome the changes in society,
live the intercultural reality: all these are various challenges and yet various opportunities that
ask of us the courage to search.
Questions prompted by our charism ask for responses embodied in history: this is the
horizon where we move in view of the Assembly, as we will see more deeply in the coming
months.

Keep in the heart

It is important to give voice to the questions, but even more so, it is necessary to stay with
the questions, to let them grow inside us in order to seek answers that do not come from our
fears, our desires or projects, but from God.

Let us ask ourselves, what questions should we bring to light?

Mary teaches us the custody of the heart, the art to guard and preserve, to find a meaning
to things, to understand events, to put the pieces together patiently in order to get slowly
to a full and mature understanding.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE WORLD

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was
there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran short,

2
ERMES RONCHI, Le nude domande del Vangelo, Edizioni San Paolo, 2016, cf. pp. 9-15.
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the mother of Jesus said to him, They have no wine. [And] Jesus said to her, Woman,
how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the
servers, Do whatever he tells you. (Jn 2:1-5).

We find Mary at a wedding party, at that banquet which symbolizes our life and the history
of humankind. Hers is a caring and discreet presence. She sees what nobody sees: the lack of
wine. The jars no longer go around, maybe others have noticed it, but do not intervene. Mary
says, They have no wine, something is missing, joy is failing, the party is ruined and lifeless.
Mary invites us to look with her eyes, beyond reality, notice the practical needs of people and
address them. Her look meets with that of her Son and elicits His intervention.
As on that day at Cana, the Lord asks us to fill the jars, to do our part: they are jars full of life,
expectations, desires, and projects, all that we carry in our hearts. It is with this little our little
that He can step in and perform the miracle. Our trust in Him, and the courage to question
ourselves and prompt answers will make us apostles of the joy of the Gospel, the good news
that is for everyone. Our trust will open new ways and possibly close others, but we will always
be men and women of the new wine.

At the banquet of life, we are asked to be next to others and among them, so as to recognize
what is missing. This is the idea of the Church which goes forth of which Pope Francis speaks:
By the strength of the love of God which you have encountered and come to know, you are
capable of sympathy and tenderness. Thus, you can be close enough to touch the other, his
wounds and his expectations, his questions and his needs, with the tenderness that is an
expression of care that erases all distances.
Never lose the momentum of walking the streets of the world, aware that walking, even with
an uncertain step or limping along, is always better than standing still, withdrawn in your own
questions or sense of security. The missionary passion, the joy of the encounter with Christ
that urges you to share with others the beauty of faith, reduces the risk of becoming stuck in
individualism.
Poor among the poor, but with a burning heart. Never still, always on the move. Together
and sent out, even when you are alone, because your consecration makes of you a living spark
of the Church. Always on the road, borne along by the virtue that is of pilgrims: joy!3

It is this passion for man (humankind) that Father Faccenda left us as a precious heritage.
That man (humankind) in which he believed and to whom he gave all of himself: time, energy,
attention, food for the body and the soul.
"I too understood the needs of my time. Following the inner inspiration and the advice of
my spiritual director, and docile to the voice of those who spoke on behalf of the Church and of
the Seraphic Order, the Institute was born. It had a well-defined appearance, unmistakable
among a thousand, with an inner zeal fitting for those who want to devote themselves to
missionary activity, as well as to seize all those gifts and values that the goodness of God
wanted to offer to humankind.
With humility, trepidation and determination I listened to the signs of the time, of the Church
and of history. I studied man, I loved him to exhaustion, and I understood that his hunger was

3
POPE FRANCIS, Address to the Participants in the General Assembly of the Italian Conference of Secular Institutes, Rome,
May 10, 2014.
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hunger for God, justice and hope. That is why I aimed with confidence from the very first
moment, and then we aimed together towards the one goal: have him meet in a deeper and more
complete manner with the Mother, because we had the certainty that the Mother would open
the way to her Son, the Redeemer, and the Son would reconcile him to the Father."4

The signs of the times

Studying the signs of the times calls for discernment and listening, openness to the new and
different.

Let us ask for the gift of the Spirit, which blows free and liberating, so that it may shake
us from any form of lethargy and reawaken us to the joy of the mission.
May Mary, the woman who can scrutinize Gods times, teach us to live our time and find
in Christ a new look on the world.

WORKING PREPARATION

In this spirit, I present some guidelines for the preparatory phase of the Assembly, leaving to
the next letter known as the Letter of Convocation to the Assembly everything that refers to its
agenda and practical outline.

The preparatory phase consists of the following stages:

1. Spiritual and intellectual preparation

2. Pre-Assembly Committees
3. Pre-Assembly Visitations
4. Election of the delegate Missionaries and Volunteers who will participate in the Assembly
5. Reports

4
OVS IV, Luomo questo consacrato, Verona, September 23, 1979, cf. pp. 338-347.
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1. SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION

The first part of the letter is a reflection and preparation for the Assembly. Our
Constitutions remind us that this is a special time for review, reflection, participation, and
responsibility in the life of the Institute, in humble listening to the Spirit (#134).
Let us ask Mary to renew our trust in the Lord who guides history, that He may grant us
the courage to search and the gift of a new gaze.

Prayer suggestions for these months

Invoke often the Holy Spirit on a personal and community level asking for a new
outpouring of His presence throughout the Institute.
Have a monthly Mass celebrated in every community chapel (or where it is not possible
have it offered elsewhere) with this intention.
Intensify personal and community Eucharistic Adoration, introducing the upcoming
Assembly as the main intention.
Add the attached prayer (prepared by one of the Missionaries for this occasion) to the
personal and community prayer.
Involve family, friends, and cloisters in prayer.
On March 25, 2018, feast of the Institute, in communion with all the Missionaries,
Volunteers, collaborators and friends, we will hold a vigil prayer sent by the General
Council.

Guidelines for in-depth study

I suggest everyone read:

The final document of the 8th General Assembly

The document of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of
Apostolic Life, New Wine, New Wineskins
The final document of the 2015 European Conference of the Volunteers
The final document of the 2015 Latin American Conference of the Volunteers

From June 8 to 10, 2018, as an immediate preparation to the Assembly, the Missionaries
delegate will participate in a short course led by Sister Nicla Spezzati, undersecretary of the
Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
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2. PRE-ASSEMBLY COMMITTEES

There will be two Pre-Assembly Committees and the names of their members will be
announced by October 30th.
One Committee will have the task to prepare the Working Document for the Assembly,
containing:
The summary of the work that each community will do in the coming months on the
charismatic questions and historic answers (in September every community and
missionary will receive the material)
The summary of the various proposals that the Missionaries will present for
consideration during the Assembly (see Const. #136).

The other Committee will have a financial nature, with the task of:
Collecting the material elaborated by the communities, starting from a proposal that
will be handed out after the January study for Europe and February for Latin America;
Preparing a draft of the Financial Directory to be presented at the Assembly.

3. PRE-ASSEMBLY VISITATIONS

In the past six years some communities were visited several times by me or one of the
Council members, and helped in their discernment journeys. Therefore, I will not visit all the
communities, but only some.

4. ELECTION OF THE DELEGATES

Communities are invited to elect the delegates who will participate in the General Assembly
according to the procedure described in the Constitutions and Norms of Life (see Const. #138-
141) and to submit their names to the General Secretary by December 30, 2017.

Let me remind you that in electing the delegates we are to choose individuals who will be
able to offer their contribution during the Assembly at liberty, and who can express their
opinion not only through their vote, but also verbally. This does not mean that we are to elect
only individuals culturally educated. Rather, they need to be individuals who, regardless of
their education, are gifted with common sense and Gospel wisdom, able to look for the good of
the whole Institute and not only of their community.
The groups ad experimentum, according to what the Congregation for Consecrated Life and
Societies of Apostolic Life suggested, will follow the same procedure of the communities.
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Participation of the Fr. Kolbe Volunteers of the Immaculata

The Council decided that the Volunteers, as associated members of the Institute, will
participate in the Assembly through one representative from each country during the
sessions in which topics related to the Volunteers and the apostolic dimension of the Institute
will be discussed.
Volunteers have been preparing for the Assembly for some time. Each of them, in fact,
through a questionnaire, was invited to present suggestions or amendments to the Bylaws, so
as to express and live better their membership in the Institute and their vocational identity as
Volunteers.
The material collected will be the subject of dialogue and discussion during the
international meeting in Poland from July 13 to 18, 2017, with the participation of
representatives from all the nations. The summary of their work will be gathered in concrete
proposals that will be presented and evaluated during the Assembly.

With regard to the election of the representative who will participate in the Assembly, we
suggest to proceed in this way:
Set a date when all the associated Volunteers can be present, or at least two-thirds of
them.
Ask who among them is concretely available to participate and offer this service.
Prepare a list of candidates and then proceed to elect by a relative majority (who polls
more votes than any other).
Study together how to pay for travel expenses. If possible, encourage a sign of
collaboration and sharing from everyone.

The names of the Volunteers chosen must be sent to the General Secretary by December 30,
2017.

5. REPORTS

To encourage an environment of listening and discernment during the informative phase of

the Assembly, we suggest some criteria for the preparation and submission of the reports.
During the Assembly will be presented and read:
The general financial report
The general report of the Institute which will also include notes about the initial and
ongoing formation, evangelization and the Volunteers.

The national reports will not be read in the Assembly hall, but only discussed. Each delegate
will receive them one month before the Assembly and will have time to read them calmly and
in an atmosphere of prayer.

For nations where only one community is present, the local directress will write and sign
the report.
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For nations with two or three communities, the local directresses and/or the coordinators
will write and sign the report.
Each of them will ask for the contribution of the Missionaries of the community in order to
present the reality of the Institute in the most complete and objective manner.

All the reports must be sent to the General Secretary by March 31, 2018.

For Italy, which includes various communities, we decided:

Each local directress will write a report on her community and, after its reading and
approval by the community council, will send it to the General Secretary by
February 28, 2018.
Elisabetta Corradini will write only one report based on these reports.

In attachment to this letter, we offer guidelines to follow for writing the reports.

Our journey towards the Assembly, as I said, begins in the 100th anniversary of the
apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, a joyful and beautiful coincidence. Mary is with us and
opens the way before us.
Let us entrust this time of preparation and anticipation to her maternal heart.

United in thought and prayer,

General Directress