Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) – The spiritual message of the canonisation of Daniele Comboni is a call to his spiritual daughters in three words or ideas, the ideas that Comboni wrote in his famous Plan for the global mission to evangelise Africa, says Sister Adele Brambilla, Superior General of the Comboni Missionary Sisters, who made the following statement to Fides.
“It its time…» I think it is important for us to look at the hour, the present with the eyes of Comboni. To see it with his passion for God and humanity, with his great trust in people. It is time to move more radically in his charisma, to enter his deep intuition, in his vision of the Church.
A second word underlined in the Plan: “we dare”. With him we dare to repeat this word despite our “miraculous weakness” (as Comboni called it). We consecrated ad gentes women of the third millennium dare to embrace this charisma, handing it on to the next generations in its entirety. We dare to embrace his methods: the idea-force of the Plan, which becomes programme and method for missionary presence and action (Regenerating Africa with Africa). We dare to look at mission with his eyes, to see potential, riches, ability, new energies which evangelise us first of all. We dare to profess our unconditional faith in mission, not as protagonists, but as servants of a common cause which puts us besides the least, the poorest of the poor, the abandoned, all the situations in Nigrizia which surround us.
“We hope, yes we hope”. Comboni hopes for the actualisation of his Plan, today we can say that it is a reality. We feel he is alive. We hope first of all for Africa, for this young Church full of hope. Comboni’s hope has assumed the face of many Sisters who with their life have responded to this challenge. I think of the thousands of faces of Sisters, with different names, but with the same passion, his love for humanity; they fight against slavery today, hunger, AIDS, Ebola, illiteracy…they know how to give hope. They embrace a common cause and never turn back, knowing that they are hidden stones, tiny mustard seeds which generate life. They speak, in one of the 100 languages which Daniele Comboni longed to speak to infect others. Women of Africa, America, Europe, Asia who put their lives at the service of justice and peace, women who speak though the media in intense missionary animation.
They are able to deal with everyone, approach everyone, share their female gifts of tenderness, ability, dialogue, desire to generate, to promote life, these are the qualities which filled the heart of Comboni with great hope for the future. On 14 September a new life was born to our family: young women of Africa, Latin America, Europe and also an Asian fruit, asked to consecrate their lives, they asked to share this dream of Daniele Comboni which has become a reality in the third millennium: “I die, but my work will not die”. SL (Fides Service 4/10/2003 EM lines 38 Words: 515)
