THE CAMILLIANS
THE WOMEN MINISTERS OF THE SICK OF ST. CAMILLUS
THE DAUGHTERS OF ST. CAMILLUS

11 February 2016 Grottaferrata (Roma) – Generalate House of the ‘Daughters of St. Camillus’

We opened the meeting with an intense and personal spiritual exchange of views on the dimension of ‘mercy’ of our Camillian saints and blesseds: St. Camillus, the Blessed Enrico Rebuschini, the Blessed Luigi Tezza, the Blessed Maria Domenica Brun Barbantini, and the Blessed Giuseppina Vannini!

The aim of our coming together was to begin to respond to certain questions about a greater ‘charismatic’ unity: what can the ‘men Camillians’ and the ‘women Camillians’ do together? What forms of cooperation can be achieved between us, sharing resources and projects?

An experience of the mercy of God fully ‘shook’ the lives of our founders and re-modulated and converted living faith, burning hope and the deepest charity into a practical expression of their vocations and charismatic choices. An experience of the mercy of God allowed them to become aware, with humility, of their personal limitations and frailties and to trust in the goodness of God and to bear the tribulations, the limitations and the forms of resistance that come from the world and external relationships (the frailties of other people!): all of this was faced up to with peace, determination, serenity and perseverance!

The mercy of God was perceived by our saints as an all-consuming experience of the constant, intimate and irresistible presence of God in their personal histories: a presence that became an experience of ‘protection’ and of support in the face of displeasure, disgust, mourning, failure, sin…The mercy of God for our saints was also a source of ‘truth’ about their lives and the lives of the people that they met. Their benevolence and lovable characters were not ‘hypocritical’ but, rather, always illuminated by truth: the beneficial and health-inducing of mercy always requires a prior diagnosis of the truth of our concrete life situations! The mercy of God (GIFT of God, envisaged, listened to, thought about…), when received, welcomed and lived becomes a source of compassion (WITH-GOD, that is to say an experience shared with man) which animates the welcoming, the care for, the taking responsibility for, and service to, the sick. The mercy of God cannot be held back and conserved in an autonomous and self-referential way. It must become a magmatic experience that overflows in meetings and in relationships, above all in pain, in suffering…offering courage, serenity, an untiring spirit of initiative, and full confidence in the providential presence of the Lord and the goodness of the human heart and human freedom!

The mercy of God in the lives of our founders became for them not a ‘theory about the love of God’, not a ‘protective and/or security element which distances people from history and man’, but, rather, a stimulus to grow in resilience within history so that it could become a real history of salvation for them and for other people!