From Madre Vannini «Si trasfonda nelle donne lo spirito di san Camillo»

By Teresa Bertoncello

Vannini in her role as the Mother was a strong and pragmatic woman. She was a female person who carried her family on her shoulders with all of its needs – human, social, administrative and economic needs – to which, given the family in question, were added religious and ecclesial needs.

Her mission led her to provide formation to sisters who would have solid human and spiritual bases and who would produce or promote works of care: sisters who were healthy in their Christian spirit and efficient in their professionalism and their working techniques.

Her work did not specifically involve the provision of direct help to sick people: she strove to establish the foundations of a Congregation that would grow because of its intrinsic strength, deposited as a seed by the spirit of St. Camillus and her generative activity.

Her attention was not directed to contemplation and a connected penetration of the mysteries that formed the basis and completion of her life and the lives of other people. Her interior life, so jealously kept in her sacrarium, did not express, or allow others to think that there were, flashes of mystical experience understood in the Catholic Christian meaning of the term.

The aspect of her mystery lay in that divine cloud which, as happened to the Chosen People in the desert, remained above her head without ever revealing itself during the desert of her youth, and which opened up to her in front of that unforeseen, but mystically perceived, land that she would have to work on, seed and nourish so that it would produce healthy and abundant fruit.

Her mystery was also in that night of purification that would lead her to offer up her own life for the life of the Institute so that ‘the little seed was (not) lost’.

And lastly in that suffering which, making her constitution fall sick, would consume her life in a great – precisely because it was disconcerting – agony.

     Her mystery was in that design of God that chose her, prepared her, activated her and consumed her for its implementation.