Viva Memoria n. 38

The Redemptoristine's Theological Journal

July 2016

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E D I T O R I A L

VIVA MEMORIA – n. 38

July 2016

THE REDEMPTORISTINE’S THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL

Dear Redemptoristine Sisters, Dear Redemptorists, Dear Readers,

Welcome! Yes, welcome to this publication of ‘your’ Theological Journal. In the name of the members of the Service Board we wish you happy but more importantly, informed and inspired reading from the articles you will find in this Journal. Since the last Journal, the younger, better ‘the more recently professed’ Sisters, met in Scala for a meeting (27.07-03.08.2016) The subject of the meeting was inspired by the words of Pope Francis’ in his letter to the Religious for the Year Dedicated to the Consecrated. We quote the Holy Father’s own words as addressed to the Consecrated: “… looking to the past with gratitude, living the present with Passion and looking into the future with hope” (Pope Francis).

The meeting was graced with the presence of Rev. Michael Brehl, C.Ss.R., the Redemptorists’ Superior General, who spoke of some perspectives for the future of our Order. Sister Imma Di Stefano, O.Ss.R., the prioress of the Scala community, gave a gracious welcome address to all the participants, expressing the joy of her community as the hostesses of this meeting. (Sister Imma’s welcome address will be printed here in its entirety. It is the first article.)

Sister Imma (of Scala) is well qualified to speak of “THE REDEMPTORISTINE CHARISM.” Her article follows her welcome address. In this article Sister Imma adequately covers the highlights of our charism: Community, the Gospels, the Eucharist and Prayer.

Mother Maria Celeste spoke to us, in images. This article entitled: -

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“M. Celeste and Some of Her Images” by Sister Ewa Dobrzelecka, O.Ss.R., gathers together many of these beautiful images for our reflections. Sister Ewa points out that Mother Celeste did not tell us to look at herself but to “Look at the sun and see the ‘Light of the World,’… light, created as a symbol of the divine Sun.” In this article we read that Mother Celeste compares God to: “… an OCEAN and we are just a drop of water in this OCEAN.” You will find in this article an image to inspire you to “look to the “Light of the World, the Ocean,” of an image of your preference. The next article by Rev. Alfonso Amarante, C.Ss.R. is very timely as it is a faithful commentary on Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter, proclaiming a “Year of the Consecrated.” Father Amarante has aptly shown how Redemptoristines can look at the “past with gratitude,” especially for Blessed M. M. Celeste. No suffering or trials were too much for her in her love for Jesus. The high light of Father’s article is “love.” Jesus to Celeste: “I gave My WILL, by loving you with the same divine love with which I love My heavenly Father, having given My own life for your eternal salvation.”

Our History and Pilgrimages: The participants of the Scala meeting were delighted to have the opportunity to visit the monasteries, etc. which will always remain a very important, not to be forgotten - aspect of our beginnings. First and foremost is Scala. Sister Giovanna Lauritano, O.Ss.R. has written well on the origin and history of Scala, our first monastery and how Scala also became the first Redemptorist community of St.

Alphonsus and his first followers. Sant’ Agata – Sister Anna Maria Ceneri, O.Ss.R. writes well for us on the Bishopric See of St. Alphonsus. After becoming a Bishop of St. Agatha, it did not take Alphonsus very long to call upon the Redemptoristines of Scala to establish a monastery in St. Agatha to pray for his Diocese. Perhaps it is proper to say, as Sister indicates, the Redemptoristines of Sant’Agata are keeping alive the remembrance of St. Alphonsus in St. Agatha. A must for this meeting of the newly professed at Scala, was a visit to Foggia! Sister Angela Severo, a Redemptoristine of Foggia, welcomed the Sisters to her community, which is blessed with the mortal remains of Mother Maria Celeste. In Sister’s welcome address, she presented a concise and very inspirational summary of the teaching of Mother M. Celeste. Fittingly, Sister Angela concludes her welcome on an Easter note of joy: “…

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We cannot be silent about the greatest joy we have in our hearts – the Beatification of our Mother Maria Celeste – Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!” Dublin – Ireland: We move on now into other parts of non-Italian Europe. Sister Monica Boggan, O.Ss.R. writes about the founding of her community in Ireland in 1859. This community grew rapidly and had sufficient members to send six Sisters to bring the Redemptoristines to England. Sister Monica says it well: “… The monastery remains in the heart of Dublin and plays a pivotal role in the local community.” Cebu – Philipppines: We move forward as Sister Alice Agosto, O.Ss.R. – “ … Looks to the past with gratitude.” Her community has a motto: “Living in love and for love, burning continuously until My fire becomes your fire.” This motto helps the Sisters to live fervently in the present.

Appendix Magadalena Chojnowska, a novice of the Bielsko-Biala, (Poland) community has chosen a good topic for a beginner in the Redemptoristine life: “Has a Mystic of more than 250 years ago anything to say to the youth of today?” Novice Magdalena thinks that our Mother Maria Celeste has plenty to say to the young ladies of our day. To mention one quality of our Mystic, which speaks to today’s youth; “… she took the responsibility of her own conscience.”

Witnesses: We conclude the articles and sharings of the participants of the Scala meeting with testimonies of two novices as they begin their long journey to profession as a Redemptoristine. Firstly: Novice Lodovica of Scala – Leaving behind interesting and different experiences, Lodovica felt the call to enter the Redemptoristines at Scala.

Her call came while she was attending the “World Youth Day in Madrid.” We will use one quote from Novice Lodovica’s story: “Let him alone fly who dares to do so … !” Lodovica dared to fly and this was the spark that lighted her way to Scala.

Novice Izabela, of Bielsko Biała, Poland tells her story and how she felt the Lord’s call to the Religious Life. Her monastery of choice is with the Redemptoristines of Bielsko, where she is living now. She assures us: “I am very grateful to God and happy that He chose me for the Redemptoristine Family.”

Sr. Joan Calver, O.Ss.R. and the Service

Board

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Index

Editorial

Welcome to Scala Sr. Imma Di Stefano. O.Ss.R., Scala

The Redemptoristine charism Sr. Imma Di Stefano, O.Ss.R., Scala M. Celeste and some of her images Sr. Ewa Dobrzelecka, O.Ss.R., Bielsko-Biała Hope in the consecrated life Fr. Alfonso V. Amarante, C.Ss.R.

Our history and our pilgrimages … The monastery of SCALA and its history Sr. Giovana Lauritano, O.Ss.R., Scala

Alphonsus Maria de Liguori and Maria Celeste Crostarosa - a profound and sincere friendship Sr. Anna Maria Ceneri, O.Ss.R., S. Agata dei Goti

Welcome to the Monastery of the Most Holy Saviour, Sr. Angela Severo, OSsR, Foggia

The History of the Redemptoristines in Dublin Sr. Monica Boggan, O.Ss.R., Dublin

Redemptoristine Nuns, Philippines - history

Appendix Has a mystic who lived more than two hundred and fifty years ago anything to say to the youth of today? Magdalena Chojnowska, O.Ss.R. novice, Bielsko-Biała

Witnesses

My vocation, Lodovica d’Amato, O.Ss.R. novice, Scala Izabela Stokłosa, O.Ss.R. novice, Bielsko Biała

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Sr. Petra Maria Amershuber, O.Ss.R., Dublin

John Bradbury, Australia

Elisabeth Chestnut, U.S.A.

Sr. Magdalena Chojnowska, O.Ss.R. Bielsko

Sr. Maria D’Amato, O.Ss.R., Scala,

Sr. Ewa Dobrzelecka, O.Ss.R, Bielsko

Sr. Hilde de Paepe, O.Ss.R., Dublin

Peter Gross, Germany

Fr. Emilo Lage, CSsR, Rome

Rafael Leon, Puerto Rico

Sr. Chantal Lussier, O.Ss.R., Canada

Fr. Patrice Nyanda, C.Ss.R.,

Sr. Magdalena Schumann, O.Ss.R., Dublin

Fr. Damian Wall, C.Ss.R., Puerto Rico

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Welcome to Scala Sr. Imma Di Stefano. O.Ss.R., Scala Dearest Sisters and dearest Fathers, WELCOME TO SCALA!

In the name of the whole community I am communicating our joy at welcoming you, with the hope that this meeting can be the first of many others…! I believe that your presence here today is an important signal for the whole Order. Your communities have certainly made a great sacrifice in permitting you to participate in this meeting and this is an indication of the will and desire to increasingly be a single great Redemptoristine family, a single great community which undertakes to share, communicate and journey together and therefore to grow…

With these few words I would like to introduce you to the theme that

we shall be developing in these days, and of which in reality you will be the principal protagonists. As you have already read in the programme that was sent to you by Sr. Ewa, we shall be seeking to deepen our specific Redemptoristine charism according to the guidelines that Pope Francis gave us in his letter to consecrated religious in this particular year dedicated to the religious life. The Pope’s first suggestion is “to look at the past with gratitude”. Beginning with the history of the origins of our Order, the opportunity will be given to each one of you to tell us the history of your communities. As in every reality, knowledge precedes love, and therefore coming to know about your origins will permit us to love you even more and be grateful to the Lord for such a gift. We shall indeed discover, exactly what and how many links were developed over the centuries and which united us in the past, links that we wish to reinforce in the present. The second point of the Pope’s reflection is “living in the present with passion”. After listening to certain matters for reflection about Crostarosan spirituality, the dialogue will return to you. You will be telling us how you presently live your charism in the communities you belong to, your customs, and your creativity and originality… It will be good to discover that we are united by the same charism, but also that the Spirit has given rise to a different style in each of you, and that you all have your own special charism. We shall certainly enrich one another with our respective experiences of life. So not just “theory” but also life as it is lived and as planned for the future. This will be the final point in our studying how “to embrace the future with hope”. In order to have a prophetic insight, the Pope tells us, consecrated men and

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women are not only called to read the signs of the times in the present, but to anticipate them, to have a vision that looks ahead and which also knows how to see the presence of God in history. I believe, therefore, that not only are we called to ask ourselves “what is the Redemptoristine of today?” but we must also ask “what will be, or what could be, the Redemptoristine of tomorrow?” And clearly, if we want to know what the Redemptoristine is or will be, we must always remain in contact with the reality which surrounds us, with the people of God, with their expectations, and their difficulties and anxieties. Otherwise our progress will be one-sided, and we will travel in one way, but the people will not be able to follow us! We must always ask ourselves if the people of God are able to travel with us, if they can understand us, and if we are in fact relevant, or otherwise we risk falling into that self-referentiality which the Pope condemns, which is a form of narcissism where we always place ourselves in front of a mirror without taking any notice of who is there with us.

When I hear the Pope speak, with his discourses on joy, on witness, on

openness, on communion, on Mercy, it seems to me almost as if he is referring every time to our own spirituality! We are grateful to the Lord for this, because we are living a charism which is ancient, but always new, always current and, I would say, also innovative and quite prophetic. The LIVING MEMORIAL today seems like a theological concept that is taken for granted, obvious and born of the 2nd Vatican Council. Sr. Celeste received this intuition from the Spirit some two centuries before, and today we are asked to rediscover it and develop it. But how?

This morning I would like to propose to you just one key to reading

which the Pope mentions yet again. This key is the Gospels. You know very well that the title given by the Foundress to the text of the new rules is: “Institute and Rules of the Most Holy Saviour contained in the Holy Gospels”. And so the truth of the Institute, the Rules and therefore of the Order, finds its key to reading, interpretation and practical implementation in the Gospels. Why? Because, Mother Celeste tells us, “in a single phrase of the Gospels there are all the divine perfections, because in them are the substantial Word of the Father from which they have come”. And so it is necessary for the Redemptoristine Sisters, the individual communities, and the entire Order to go back to the Gospels and the whole Bible, because they all announce Christ.

In speaking of the Gospels as the key to reading about our spirituality

and of all our lives, I would like to leave you with a passage from John the Evangelist, the very famous passage about the Samaritan woman. Do you remember? Jesus, after a long journey on foot, was exhausted and thirsty,

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and stopped to sit down beside a well. There he met a woman from Samaria and He asked her for something to drink. I shall not enter into the discussion between Jesus and the woman. What struck me is that the whole life of Jesus was “spent” in encountering others, and encountering them, not superficially, but profoundly, in the wells of our existence, our fragility and our aridity. It was not just He who was thirsty, but also the woman was thirsty for love, thirsty for a genuine relationship after five failures. Another element that struck me was the term “water”. The woman speaks of material water, the water from the well which was stationary and static at the bottom of a cistern. But Jesus speaks of living and flowing water from a spring that is moving. While the water mentioned by the woman required a movement on her part to be collected, the water Jesus spoke of comes to us of itself, without our merit or will. It is always God who takes the first step, and it is He who moves towards us, desires to meet us and “overpowers” us with His love. And finally there is the point which I believe is addressed to us particularly. Jesus replies to the woman: “… whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him, will never again be thirsty, but rather, the water that I shall give him shall become in him a source of water that flows for eternal life”. Jesus not only quenches our thirst, but transforms us into the spring itself so that in our turn we can quench the thirst of others. Is this living memorial not perhaps our charism? Letting ourselves encounter Jesus right where we are with all our poverty, and progressively letting ourselves be transformed into the source of living water, into Christ Himself. The living memorial, the living Gospel, the living water!

In these days of summer heat I pray that you will be able to relive the freshness of your encounter with this Fountain so that it may be ever more alive and moving within each one of us, so that the Redemption may be ever more abundant…

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The Redemptoristine charism

Sr. Imma Di Stefano, O.Ss.R., Scala

Dearest Sisters, The course we are going to follow together

is indeed a very interesting one! I think it is like looking at a photograph with the faces of each one of you representing the present and the future of our Order. On the other hand, although we have left the past and our origins behind us, when we look at our photos we can never forget the older members of the family to whom, indeed, we owe a debt of gratitude. Without the existence of our elders, in fact, we would lose the foundation of our lives. When we look at a photograph, we have no trouble saying whom we resemble, be it a cousin or a brother or a grandparent. And this is the way in which we have moved on from the “elders” of our past history when we remind ourselves of who we are and who we try to resemble. Clearly, our most important “elder” is Sr. Celeste, who in her turn “resembles” our Redeemer. So today I would like to present, amongst other things, the principal points of our charism which we certainly already know and which we are seeking only to bring to light. With this image of the photograph and the various resemblances, I wanted to focus attention on what the heart of our Redemptoristine spirituality is – the “living memorial of the Redeemer”, which in practice is the very life of Jesus. Our whole lives, as well as the dark red colour of our habits, has a “memorial” value and seeks to record the Love of God for humanity, and His profound desire for communion. Here I want to refer to a passage which you know very well, that we are not inanimate copies of Christ and His actions, but it is Christ Himself who makes us participants in His life, so that we can say with St. Paul: “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me”. Not a simple “imitation” of actions, but a “participation” in the very life of God. It is not a question of theological principles or games with words, but a completely different perspective for looking at things and our entire lives. What Sr. Celeste has transmitted to us is nowadays something given at “discount” in the Church of our days, but this was not the case in the 1700s when great emphasis and importance was placed on the “practice” of loving Jesus, the “effort” of encountering Him, and “doing” something to bring Him close to us. Sr. Celeste, to put it in modern terms, was not someone who “practised being” Jesus, and never lived her relationship with Him as an “effort”, but as an “experience” which always came from Him, as we saw the other day in our study of Jesus with the Samaritan woman. It is He who draws close to us “descending from the

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stars”, as St. Alphonsus would have said! From this living experience of Christ our Order was born in the Church and our mission radiates out from the “living memorial” and develops in different ways all linked to that single centre which is precisely the very life of Jesus in us. I am going to summarize these different ways in point form to make our discussion easier:

1) Community life. The fact of being a “viva memoria” for us is not a

journey of personal perfection but a community journey in fraternal love. It is in love that we are changed, in the charity we show towards our fellow Sisters, and this can shine out in the world as the true Face of the God of Love, Communion and Dialogue. In this sense, we do not have various kinds of penances or mortifications, which nowadays are merely a part of an imaginary collective of dark shadows which give monasteries an aura of mystery! Our “task” if anything, is that of building our mutual joy every day and irradiating it forth from the walls of our monastery. As a result of this, it is no wonder that our first rule is in fact about “union and mutual charity”. In this discourse about communion, permit me to repeat my wish for you and for the whole Order. My wish is for ever closer links between our communities in dialogue, exchange and acceptance. Our globalized and indifferent world is asking and calling us to be witnesses to a true fraternity and communion. A communion which is not like that of the world, which tends to be intolerant of diversity and cancels out differences, but a communion which can be summed up in one single word, “integration”, creating harmony with all the music and instruments we have at our disposition, including those of our fragility.

2) The Gospels. As I have already said, all the different points of our

Constitutions are introduced by a passage from the Gospels. How can we relive the life of Jesus if we do not base ourselves on His very words? If we open ourselves to them, then every day we assimilate more and more the life of the Master who wishes to grow and be reborn continually in us. On this journey, we take Mary as our guide and model. Like her, we have to try to conceive Christ within us to be, we might say, always “pregnant” with Him and give birth to Him continually for humanity. But we should take notice. As there is no birth without a relationship of love, so there is no fertility without communion with Christ. And we have been called to be mothers. Being women helps us to develop this particular sensibility towards a maternal acceptance of the Word, and this continual gestation of the Son of God.

3) The Eucharist. Clearly the sacrament of communion par excellence.

In it and through it we continue to learn to live in communion with Our Lord

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better, so as to be, in ourselves, for the Church and for the world, a living Eucharist, like Him. Within her Little Spiritual Garden, Sr. Celeste says: “Here it does not happen like the other bodily foods on which we are nourished, and which are converted into substance; but this heavenly and spiritual food acts so that we are transformed and change into Him Himself”. It was not by chance that Sr. Celeste always received her revelations from the Lord after the Eucharist, which she lived, as we have repeated many times, as a true encounter with the living Christ.

4) Prayer. It is the work of the Holy Spirit in us that permits us to

recognize God as our Lord and cry out: “Abba, Father!” Praying is not task, either for us or for any of the baptized. Prayer is breathing the air of God, and surrendering ourselves to His Love. As contemplative nuns, we do not pray “in the place of others” nor, even less, as “better than others”! Rather, we would like to be witnesses of the essential nature of this breathing, without which there is no life. Once again it is the “viva memoria” of the prayer of Christ Himself, who, when He was in the world, was incessantly in dialogue with His Father. To continue on with the image of breathing. We are not called to breathe with the lungs or mouth of someone else, in place of our own, nor are we a rapid response team who can work a kind of artificial respiration, because the air we wish to transmit and communicate is not our own. However, we can point out zones of pure air, we can take on the task of keeping it a bit more pure, we can bring those we meet close to the Source, just like when sick people are placed next to a window so they can breathe more easily. To sum up, our prayers have a specific function which is that of intercession, literally, “journeying in the middle”. Perhaps you can now see before your eyes the scene from the Gospels when the paralytic was lowered down from the roof by four friends who recognized salvation, and the pure Air in Jesus. Those four friends placed themselves in the middle, between the sick man and Jesus, and their prayers were heard. In this sense we are truly missionary in prayer…

5) Enclosure. It is not by chance that I have placed this aspect at the

end of this summary and I hope that I will be understood easily enough on this point! From what has been said until now about our spirituality, you will understand very well that enclosure is not in any way the purpose of our life, nor even less the motivation for it. No desire for escape has impelled me and you to undertake this path and no grille or closed door stops us from changing it. The enclosure is a door open to all those who seek the Face of God: our silence is a word of salvation; our contemplation is a missionary work” (from Const. 47). We have been chosen to love (like everyone) in a manner which in certain respects remains a mystery, but which in fact seeks to lay

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emphasis on certain values, as for example, the stability of relations of which there is much to say today. Even being in one and the same place permits those who come to pray with us to find a climate of silence and recollection already prepared for days, months and years. It is also a way of witnessing that “there is only one thing necessary”. A means, not an end. The end always remains as Communion with God and our brothers and sisters. The end, like the beginning is only Love. The Church and our Order within it has been asking itself questions on this aspect, and I am certain that every one of our communities has been doing so with the desire to make progress in finding better forms for expressing a message of a true openness to God and others without, in the process, losing the dimension of recollection and contemplation which characterises us. I believe that, as ever, indifference will be the challenge that we have been called to confront and overcome!

At the conclusion of this little survey of our charism, perhaps there will

be some perplexity or questions. It is not perhaps true that all the baptized are called to be a living memorial of Christ, and be participants in His Love? So what then is the purpose of the Redemptoristines? I think that a true Redemptoristine community in the Church is its conscience, that is to say the place that works out what it is. The Church, and every one of the baptised lives on love, but needs there to be those who remember that it is Love. We wish to be this witness, this continual remembrance, the conscience of the Church and all humanity, the conscience of being profoundly loved.

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M. Celeste and some of her images

Sr. Ewa Dobrzelecka, O.Ss.R., Bielsko-Biała

On the occasion of the Year of Consecrated Life, Pope Francis writes in his letter to consecrated Religious that, we must look to the past with gratitude, live the present with passion and embrace the future with hope. Accordingly, we may say that the story of M. Celeste imbues the essence of this, as her spirituality is so full of passion, influencing our present concerns as we try to understand some aspects of it, while at the same time relating it to our hope for the future of our life and of the Order.

The story of salvation, the story of M. Celeste and her own journey towards holiness is also ours, as we try to learn from her, to draw something for ourselves from the testimony of her life.

M. Celeste does not place the focus on herself. She shares her own spiritual life, but her main aim is to guide us to Jesus. Since she was a small girl the Lord began to form her, she received His presence His gifts in a passive way. Her spirituality was based on answering his incessant calls (“When he calls them, they answer, “Here we are!” shining with joy for their Maker” (Bar 3, 34- 35.) until she became “transformed into God through Jesus Christ who gave her the Holy Spirit”.

Pope John Paul II writes in the document Novo Millennio Ineunte (54): “A new century, a new millennium is opening in the light

of Christ. But not everyone can see this light. Ours is the wonderful and demanding task of becoming its "reflection". This is the mysterium lunae, which was so much a part of the contemplation of the Fathers of the Church, who employed this image to show the Church's dependence on Christ, the Sun whose light she reflects. It was a way of expressing what Christ himself said when he called himself the "light of the world" (Jn 8:12) and asked his disciples to be "the light of the world" (Mt 5:14)”.

Reading M . Celeste we are struck by so many images with which her

texts are permeated. We are used to images in our audiovisual contemporary world, consequently, some of Crostarosa’s images might be helpful for us today.

The Sun M. Celeste writes about this light of the world, she compares God to

the sun, which gives light and life to the whole of nature and causes growth, but also purifies and burns what needs to be destroyed. The sun is a symbol

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of God’s love animating our soul, our life. Celeste develops this imagery in her own unique way.

“Look at the material sun, how it illumines the plants of the earth, warms them and makes them grow, so that they may give back flowers and fruits, and it makes the whole world happy with its brightness. See how it shines everywhere, and only those who shut their windows and do not wish to receive its light, remain deprived of it through their own fault, and because they do not wish to look at its splendour.

This sun which you see in the visible world was created as a symbol of the divine sun, which with My divinity gives light to the interior world of the soul, with the effects 1that My divine presence produces in souls created by Me. Now from this material sun, which always shines, you will be reminded of My divine perfections, and you will see how I will make the plants of the virtues grow in your soul with the warmth of My Spirit, and may these produce the flowers and fruit of eternal life. /

I make the light illuminating your intellect and lighting up your will in My divine love; and by My divine warmth I dry up those bad humours that produce disordered passions, and I destroy the soul’s imperfection in those who keep their eyes open, and look at Me, and make My divine splendour enter into them, because the windows of their souls are open, that is, in those who do not shut them through sin. So whenever you look at this material sun, you will remember everything I have told you, and this shall be your continual prayer.” (Autobiography)*. Perceiving God as light, as the sun, implies the desire to give that light

to others, in M. Celeste’s consecrated life – mainly through prayer. Her whole spirituality is permeated with intercession, contemplation, unity with God, which immediately makes her think about sinners, about other people and she brings them to God. Her religious community has to be a sign of God’s love, a living memorial for the world.

Before continuing, let us listen Fr. E. Lage’s preface to the “Dialogues”, /Trattenimenti/, on which our reflection is based:

“Sister Maria Celeste is a passionate soul who vibrates intensely with love for the Word made man. She always looks at Him via His assumed humanity, as a

lantern of the most powerful light (“a crystalline arc that contains the divine

* Florilegium, no. 83, pp. 99-100.

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sun”), who captivates and fills her with love as she discovers the beauties of the Incarnate Word.

The love and admiration she feels lead her to a transforming union within her Beloved. Sister Maria Celeste is a personal example and, at the same time, an experienced teacher of this transformation into Christ; a transformation as a project of the Father brought about by the Spirit in souls who let Christ live His life in them.

But letting Him live and work there implies a radical negation of oneself. The “Dialogues” of Sister Maria Celeste are witness to this tension and spiritual struggle to negate her own judgement, her will and desire to be appreciated, trying always to work only for the divine “joy” and reach “the total death” that her Spouse asks of her. Then Christ lives in her soul and, in her and by means of her, brings about once more the works of love He performed when he lived on earth as a wayfarer. Therefore, the virtues of her soul are the same perfections of the Word, which, by means of the most holy Humanity of Christ, are shared with her soul.

The “Dialogues” speak of profound mystical experiences, the flight of the spirit, the divine touch, the kiss and embrace of the Spouse, the rapture and languor of love, all experiences of the soul which has been elevated to inexplicable heights. But these pages also express the bitterness of contempt, humiliation and abandonment, incomprehension and disdain, and self-love never finally appeased. It is the anguish of the soul which, flying so high, at the same time feels her fragility and misery.

Sister Maria Celeste recounts her personal experience of God, but she knows that, in uniting herself with her Spouse, she has also espoused all the other souls loved by Him, and in him she loves all of them so that all of them may love only Him. “Do not fail to write what I tell you”, she hears the Lord tell her. Therefore, Sister Maria Celeste, at the time she narrates the abundant mercies that God has shown her, is transmitting some teachings that are valid for all souls, particularly for her Nuns of the Order of the Most Holy Redeemer “ (Fr. Lage).

The Spouse

The “Dialogues”, /Trattenimenti/, let’s repeat, are a kind of spiritual diary of Celeste, consisting of conversations with the Lord her Spouse and her personal experiences. They describe how Jesus guides her through spiritual ways with great patience, delicacy and with tenderness. He seems to be a mild and trustful educator, teaching M. Celeste to grow in his love, to mature towards holiness, but not for self alone – but for others, to intercede for them to bring them to the Lord in her heart, through prayer that she calls – love.

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Jesus also presents himself as a jealous Spouse who wants his Bride to be faithful, not to dedicate herself to useless trifles, cares and worries, but to be focused on Him, on her spiritual way together with the Lord. This Christocentric trait is very characteristic of her spirituality. Her personal relationship with Jesus, the participation in His life, was the base of her spirituality, and of all she did. In this we can and should imitate her in our daily life, in our contemplation.

“You gave me the keys to Your divine Love, which are the keys to heaven, when You gave me Your divine Son, so that He may live His life in my heart and so that I may live in Your divine Heart, where, my divine Word, the treasures of Your Heart are revealed to me where Your Spirit’s love dwells within me revealing the divine truths” (D.9).

Faith is the base of her spirituality: “it is Faith which is the only solid foundation on which the soul can build its union with My being” – describing faith M. Celeste compares it (in the Grades of Prayer) to the Biblical story of Jacob’s ladder. There are several steps of this ladder that join earth and heaven, but from each individual step God can be reached. The last step is also well based in reality– it is one of intercession, love of neighbour.

When M. Celeste was about 12 the Lord told her he would be her only Guide. She had spiritual directors, but as she confesses in the “Dialogues”, their human words did not bring healing, did not have that transforming power, as Jesus’ words. She used to hear them from Jesus in her heart, during her mystical experiences, in prayer. She wrote down what she heard from her Lord: “Daughter do not be afraid. My Spirit, which rests in the just soul, as on its own throne, is never silent!” The Spirit is never silent in a heart of a just person. Thus she seems to suggest that all Christians can hear the Spirit, talking to us.

Reading M . Celeste we are struck by so many images with which her texts are permeated. We are used to images in our audiovisual contemporary world, consequently, some of Crostarosa’s images might be helpful for us today.

The mountain

At the beginning of the “Dialogues” we find a description of a mountain. This image is characteristic also of the Carmelites, but M. Celeste interprets it in her own way. The mountain which is an image of God contains also a source of water, a source of life. And the water flows down and fills the valleys, the

deeper they are the more water can enter. We have to be like deep valleys, open and humble, so that the water of God’s grace, can fill us to the full.

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In the first “Dialogue” M. Celeste talks about human dignity. Every human being is sealed by God with “a seal of love” and an image of Christ is engraved in him or her. Thus the Father can say: “in loving him I love you.. you are stamped with one image, one seal, you are a single imprint” (D. 3).

Then immediately she speaks about humility, without which we cannot open our hearts to God. We have to learn humility, we need a kind of annihilation of our judgments, our pride. M. Celeste says more about it in the seventh “Dialogue”, while talking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In order to accept these gifts we have to annihilate our mind, our will, our emotions. When we open an internal space in our soul, we can receive the gifts and the Holy Spirit, we can receive God. Humility is truth and when we have it, we are free to experience the happiness of God’s children.

The Heart

Leading Celeste through her spiritual ways, the Lord gives her his heart, so that she may love Him with his own heart: “Receive this Heart of Mine so that you may love Me with My very own love forever.” (“Dialogue” 9). /I no longer find my own heart within myself, but in exchange for mine, I find Your heart within my breast”/D. 2/.

It is a mystical experience, a spiritual “transplantation” - an image again, illustrating the experience described by Paul: “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me…” (Gal 2,20). She also writes that Jesus is the Heart of the Father. A heart is a biblical symbol of feelings, emotions, but also attitudes, of what is most intimate; here it is an image of faithful Divine love.

In Jesus’ Heart Celeste meets Our Lady and the Saints. This is an eschatological image anticipating eternity, paradise, which we can already taste and participate in here on earth.

The Lord invites M. Celeste to live hidden in His heart: “Enter into My divine Heart to dwell there all your days, so that you may truly be able to imitate Me in love and works with a new life before all the world, since from among the many you are unique and dearly beloved to Me”.

It seems that His Heart is a kind of nucleus, a center from which salvation flows out. Being hidden in the Lord’s Heart is like being near the center of the world, from where all graces originate, where the salvation of many is being guided and decided. The Spouse dwells in Jesus’ heart and His heart is given to her to make her love with his divine love. Immersed in Jesus’ Heart, one can see the beauty of God’s images in people and is enabled to love them with a pure love and to intercede for them.

There is a certain mysterious power in our intercession and prayer, when we entrust thoughts and desires fully to God in an intimate dedication. Jesus’ love has to be jealously guarded. She writes: “I held in my hands a golden key which locked my heart with a strong lock and then

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placed the key within Your Divine Heart”. When we are friends of God and we can then be convinced like M. Celeste that He cannot but answer our ardent prayers. Intercession for the salvation of sinners returns in Celeste’s writings like a refrain.

One of the images concerning prayer for others, answering to Jesus’ call to be His companion and friend and to help Him to seek and save souls is “the dolphin fish, which – as Celeste writes - is like an ally of man which, always follows him and then guides the fish into the net for him”.

The “fixed gaze” an attitude of carefully looking at the Lord with the eyes of our souls, the art of care and concentration, is often stressed by M. Celeste: ”The first lesson You give me is to keep my eyes fixed firmly on Your divine being, and never cease to look at You, either in conversations with my neighbour or in the solitude of my cell, or when I eat and drink; never ceasing from the pure act of Your divine love”. We learn to be like Him, when we carefully fix our eyes in Him in praise and adoration. Pope John Paul II writes: “it is singularly helpful to fix our gaze on Christ's radiant face…” (VC, 14). When we gaze on the Lord, we learn to purify our intentions, so that all we do, even the smallest acts may be done for His glory. The Lord tells her: “Fix your eyes on your Eternal Highest Good and nourished by pure love, contemplate and love Me in My eternal glorification just as the blessed spirits do in heaven”. When we keep looking at Jesus, we learn his feelings and attitudes. We feel that Jesus also looks at us with love and benevolence, we feel loved and peaceful.

We do not have to fix our gaze in our own imperfections and sinfulness, but rather to look at the Lord and the Lord will heal us and teach us how to grow. Unity with God is a goal to be obtained gradually, as the Lord can only fill a purified heart, a heart of someone who is detached from earthly things.

“The more a bird rises up from the earth to fly up in the air, the higher up it rises, the more and more it enters the purest air and the more security it finds from being taken by hunters, and the more secure it is the higher it rises up in its flight. And the Christian soul, too, is all the more secure and free from every predator when in the flight of her contemplation she rises higher and higher in the most pure air that exists in the heaven of My Divinity” (Dialogue n.48).

The Bride in the Dialogues seems to be near total unity, when suddenly we can hear the Spouse admonishing her that her heart is not yet totally pure, that her thoughts are wondering somewhere, not being always faithful to His love. The Lord permits her to experience her fragility and sometimes her life seems a heavy burden. In this way, she also discovers that there is no happiness for her, except only in Him:

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“O daughter, how fitting it is for you, through an act of My purity, to rise up above your own self and above created things. I command your spirit to rise up, through this act of purity, to the throne of the immaculate Lamb .... you will make this flight on the wings of the nothingness of your being. … You can see how the temporary things are: like a little puff of smoke that rises up and is then blown away by the wind. You were created for your All who is the person of My Divinity....”

Somehow when a person perceives the beauty of God, she /or he/ suffers more seeing the sin and the ugliness among people, she sees how vain are their efforts to reach happiness, when they search it on their own, without God. Let us continue to read what the Lord tells us through M. Celeste in an image of a cage symbolising being bound, enslaved by earthly cares:

“Then you will find all this machine of the world like a round cage which imprisons all those creatures who live with their feet on the earth. And, fluttering here and there like so many imprisoned birds, they are always in motion and in pain, miserable and cramped by their lack of space.

On the other hand, those who are at liberty enjoy an uninterrupted happiness, a joyful liberty and a supreme peace of heart, and the most fortunate are those who have stronger wings, so they can fly on high. Whoever knows how to lift up these wings from the nothingness of all the trifling and of the nothingness which is in herself, will rise up on high, towards Him who is the Infinite All of every good” (Dialogue 4).

While we read the document of John Paul II “Vita consecrata”, we can have the impression of some affinity with M. Celeste, when she was describing the joys and purifications on her spiritual ways:

“The disciples who have enjoyed this intimacy with the Master, surrounded for a moment by the splendour of the Trinitarian life and of the communion of saints, and as it were caught up in the horizon of eternity, are immediately brought back to daily reality, where they see " only Jesus ", in the lowliness of his human nature, and are invited to return to the valley, to share with him the toil of God's plan and to set off courageously on the way of the Cross”.

The great desire of God to attract humanity, to reestablish the image of God in people who have lost it and thus to make them recover their dignity is also shared by M. Celeste. God’s desire to share himself with people is realized in Jesus, who is a revelation of the Fathers’ image, of His loving face. M. Celeste uses a kind of a parable explaining this truth of our faith: The Father wants to invite all to his feast and asks them to wear a habit of His Son in order to enter his house:

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“My heavenly Father, the monarch of the universe, can be compared to a great emperor who has an only-begotten son; by law His kingdom belongs to the son. But let us suppose that the Father issues an edict to all His vassals, which says that He promises to give His inheritance and kingdom to everyone, rich or poor, provided they dress themselves, not through compulsion but through love, in the same clothes, colour and form as His only-begotten Son. This is what My heavenly Father has done. Since His kingdom has no end, He has invited all mankind ... to put on the vestments of His only Son. This He has done through love and to exalt them to the greatness of the eternal kingdom...”(Dialogue 7).

The cross

The Lord finally invites M. Celeste to share the mystery of the cross with Him. The ninth Dialogue describes union with God as a spiritual matrimony – The Lord hands to her a cross encrusted with precious stones, symbolizing ‘pure love, disdain and love of the cross”… The cross present in her writings is the way to answer

God’s love, to permit God to transform her into Him, leading to the glory of the resurrection.

The cross is associated with the humanity of Christ, but M. Celeste highlights the life of Jesus as a whole, talking about the incarnation and writing in the Rules that the sisters have to follow all of the Lord’s works and actions, as they all have a salvific value.

The cross in the Dialogues is also associated with concrete facts of her life to which she refers: difficulties, misunderstandings and injustices that she experiences from people whom she loved. The Divine Spouse asks her not to complain, when people hurt her, but rather to endure everything with Him. Jesus’ life on Earth is an example of humility and annihilation, His Bride has to follow His steps.

For Saint Alphonsus detachment was one of the crucial notions. M. Celeste writes about nothingness, about her incessant longing to find God, to find the fullness of life in Him. The gift of wisdom can be received by a person who is aware of the nothingness of all things, as there is no life, no happiness, except in God.

”You alone live in My life, since outside You there is no life; and if I renounce my own self, what am I renouncing, except something that is not? What am I and the whole world, when I no longer find outside You either being, or virtue, or creatures, or anything else in life that is true?” (D.7).

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She herself is weak and cold, but the Spouse changes her heart and fills it with ardent love. She compares herself to marble, to a snake or a lizard. She is aware that there is still some earthly, low part in her. Only Jesus can change her heart.

“Your truth condemns all my ignorance, but not to condemn me, but to save me. I think I am like a snake who knows no other way of moving except slithering along the ground. Or else I am like the lizard that comes out of its burrow to be in the sunshine, lingering on the things of the earth, and warming my passions and bad inclinations through a certain appetite for the hot weather of my own self love. What was I before You spoke to my heart, if not the hardest marble? But after You spoke to my soul, You gave me the Spirit of life; in the fire of Your infinite charity, my Beloved, You lit up in my breast the living flame of Your most pure love”.

Incarnation is linked to the cross, but in the Dialogues the beauty of God prevails. The image illustrating Incarnation, repeated several time in the Dialogues, is that of a beautiful crystal with the sun inside. Jesus’ humanity radiates God’s beauty, reflects the Father’s Love in its multi-coloured dimensions. God as presented by M. Celeste, is astonishing in His beauty and attractiveness, his presence fills human hearts with gratitude and happiness and even the cross becomes to M. Celeste a sweet revelation of God’s love.

“As one sees an object in a pure crystal, so in Me, you shall see My Father, and in the Father, you will see His Word, the God-Man, in the crystalline clarity of My love. There, united in an eternal union with the Spirit of Love, you shall be aflame in that fire which burns with an infinite sweetness, and every stain and every breath that arises from the earthly part of your heart shall be consumed in this fire”.

Other images

Some of Celeste’s other images are marine in nature and recall the sea, the bay of Naples, a sea port-town, famous for its beauty, like the mountains with deep valleys below, where the bright sun irradiates in the water, reflecting the beauty of creation, where the bay cuts itself into the land, where the sea is adorned with rocks and charming little islands.

M. Celeste compares God to an ocean and we are just a drop of water in this ocean – this image recalls God’s infinite, immense love, embracing us like an ocean containing a drop of water. We are small and weak, but God is strong and He constantly gives us life, we owe everything to Him. Comparing our helplessness to God’s omnipotence, she writes also that we are like a straw dancing in the wind.

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Even so, being so fragile, we are not insignificant, we can quench the thirst of Christ. One more quotation - an lovely image of a rock from which pure water flows and Christ himself drinks it. Like in the parable on the Samaritan woman, the Lord asks us to give him a drink, to help Him:

“I saw a cliff on which there was a great stone covered with many little plants, and from out of this rock there came a brook full of clear and pure water, and You, my Jesus, were drinking from that fount or brook with great pleasure and delight. In this dream I heard Your voice of purity telling me: “These are the pure souls where my thirst is satisfied and quenched”.

Speaking about trusting in God and about abandonment she presents a very feminine image of a child in its mother womb, who is helpless and depending totally on its mother. This image illustrates entrusting ourselves to God, being open to His formation of us and sealing us with His love, bringing to mind also the spirituality of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. We can compare M. Celeste to Saint Thérèse in her childlike abandonment to God, her little way, open to everyone, at each stage of life. Like a child in its mother’s womb, we can find peace and security in God, in Him all our fears disappear.

“Look at how in truth you are, that is to say, like a little baby in the womb of its mother, that lives more in the life of its mother than by itself. It does not do anything, except what its mother does; it is fed with its mother’s nutriment, and so it must be with you, my daughter! I am your mother, I conceived you in My womb of creation and through conservation” (D. 8).

M. Celeste’s images help our imagination to perceive God’s ways to us and our ways to union with God. Nevertheless M. Celeste is aware, as was her Master Saint John of the Cross, whose traits we can find in her works on prayer, that God is beyond everything and impossible to be imagined by a human mind, that God transcends our expectations and imagination and that we have to experience a kind of “nothingness” of all things, if we wish to meet God.

The Incarnation

Yet God has given us a Way to Him - through the Incarnation, in Jesus we can meet the Father, in His Word and especially in the Eucharist, which is the major way to unite ourselves to Him, where he transforms our being into His.

Most of M. Celeste’s works, especially the Rules, were written after Holy Communion, when she felt the divine Presence. Her “Nine Rules” were so much ahead of her time, that after so many years, we find some aspects of modern theology in them! Through the Eucharist Celeste embraced sinners

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to draw them to God – the Lord assured her that this kind of prayer had special power.

In the ninth “Dialogue” M. Celeste describes how finally the Lord transformed her into Himself in a mystical experience called spiritual marriage. This happened also during the Eucharist:

“This morning, the day of Pentecost 1738, 2 Divine Word, I felt that when You entered my soul after Holy Communion, Your divine Spirit entered me like a most powerful arrow of light and penetrated my whole soul. And I understood that in You, the Word of the Father, I was given the Spirit of truth, which I received into my heart like an arrow of fire, but a very sweet one, that burned up all my evils in me”.

Jesus - the Word of God, present in Holy Scripture was a guide for her and for her sisters. M. Celeste wrote four works of evangelical meditations. Her sisters meditated on the Gospel every day and some of her books seem to be prepared for them for their daily meditations. She uses an image of a mirror to illustrate the Living Incarnated Word, alluding also to the Scriptures:

“Your divine heart, O Word, word of the Father, is the bosom in which my heart rests. To me You are a most clear mirror in which everything can be read. This mirror is an infinite book that contains the wisdom of all the Doctors....Oh book old and new, how I wish to hold You ever closer in my heart: You are my joy” (D. 2).

Trinity

Jesus, reflects and irradiates the beauty of the Father, the Holy Spirit in transforming love, the Most Holy Trinity is present in M. Celeste’s reflections. We can say that Jesus is a Viva Memoria of the Trinity – the Divine Ark of the Trinity, another of M. Celeste’s image:“O divine Ark of the treasures of God and unique treasure of my heart, when I look at You, my Jesus, I see You radiating all the beauties of the Divine attributes in the essence and divine unity of the substantial being of the Most Blessed Trinity”.

Our Lady

Our Lady has been often mentioned by M. Celeste with great love and veneration in the Exercises of Love in The Little Garden and in other works (meditations for Advent, for Lent). In the “Dialogues” she writes of Mary stressing her humility, which enabled Her to open Her life and to receive Jesus.

2 It was on 25th May, five years after Sr. Maria Celeste had left Scala (25th May 1733). She had arrived in Foggia on 5th March of the same year, 1738.

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“I was conceived in the very act communicated to her, when the Word descended into her womb: when My Spirit united Mary’s will to that same humility of the Word, and when she said those words, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord”, the humility of the Word was transferred into that Mother and at that instant I was conceived body and soul in the womb of this virgin. See how within My Father as God and in My Mother’s womb as man, I was the principle of humility” (D. 9).

Conclusion

Pope John Paul II in the document VC writes that: “The consecrated life truly constitutes a living memorial of Jesus' way of living and acting as the Incarnate Word in relation to the Father and in relation to the brethren” (Vita Consecrata, n. 22).

M. Celeste wrote about it more than 200 years ago. The Community of redemptoristines has to be a “viva memoria” a “living memorial” of all Jesus’ works, attitudes and feeling while he was a Wayfarer on earth. This can be accomplished through the action of the Holy Spirit and through each sister’s effort to open her heart to God’s loving and transforming presence. The community living in reciprocal love is a sign of God’s salvific love. The mere existence of such a faithful community is evangelizing, as the Pope says: “The consecrated life, by its very existence in the Church, seeks to serve the consecration of the lives of all the faithful, clergy and laity alike”. (Vita Consecrata, 33).

M. Celeste’s spiritual way was a pilgrimage, as was also to some extent her life – from Naples to Marigliano, to Scala and then to Pareti, Roccapiemonte and Foggia… She was like Her Lord and Spouse “homo Viatore”, a Wayfarer while he lived on earth. All those situations guided her towards a more profound understanding of what it meant to be a child of God, towards mystical, loving union with God, when she became a “flame of love”, fully abandoned to God, immersed in Him.

At the end of the “Dialogues” she writes: “Once again as I went before my Lord to recommend an affair of my neighbour, the divine Most Clement Father, my God, revealed Himself to my soul in a spiritual light and said to me: “Leave the care of all your affairs and even of yourself up to Me, your Father! I am your Father and I will bestow on you whatever I please”.

M. Celeste being a mystic presents some ways of answering God’s call. We can ask ourselves, how we open our hearts to the Lord present in

our life, to His transforming presence in the Eucharist, in His Word. How do we live the mystery of Jesus’ humanity, of his lowliness. Is God our “SOLO e SOLE” – the Sole and the Sun?

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Hope in the consecrated life

By Father Alfonso V. Amarante, C.Ss.R.

Scala, 3rd August 2015 In the composition of this article I was inspired, and closely followed the studies and articles written by Sabatino

Majorano, C.Ss.R., about Sr. Crostarosa.

1. The year of the consecrated life

With his Apostolic Letter of 21st November 2014, To all the consecrated, the Holy Father Francis proclaimed a Year of the Consecrated Life which was inaugurated on 30th November 2014, the first Sunday of Advent, to terminate on 2nd February 2016. The jubilee event celebrates and coincides with the occurrence of the 50th anniversary of both the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium on the Church, which devotes the entire 6th Chapter to the consecrated life, and also the Decree Perfectae Caritatis about the renewal of the religious life.

Pope Francis indicated that his approach was the same spiritual vision as the one described by John Paul II at the beginning of the third millennium: “You do not just have a glorious history to remember and talk about, but a great history to construct! Look to the future, in which the Spirit intends to do great things with you” (n. 110).

In the first place, the Pope is asking consecrated persons to look at the past with gratitude, not in order to enclose ourselves in a nostalgic vision, but to purify our memories and revive our spirits by it. Every Institute, in fact, has at its origin the rich experience of a charismatic dynamism. Taking an interest in our own history is a way of keeping our identity alive, opening ourselves to the future with hope, and walking faithfully in the footsteps of past generations in order to properly learn how our founders lived and incarnated our charism. The lessons that flow from this are in detecting inconsistencies and seeing where we forget essential aspects of the charism which becomes the call to conversion today and tomorrow.

The Pontiff also calls on us to live the present passionately by listening to the Spirit to bring to life the constituent parts of our own charism, since every form of the consecrated life is generated by the Spirit to help us follow Christ the way He is announced in the Gospels. The ideal of the Founders is Christ and the Gospels are the absolute rule of life. Our task this year is to let ourselves be challenged by the Gospels so as to interpret them and communicate them in the situations of our daily lives.

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The third dimension is to embrace the future with hope as the fruit of our faith in the Lord, in spite of daily problems like the decrease in vocations, economic difficulties and relativism. This viewpoint, when filled with faith, will permit the consecrated life to continue to play a major role in the future.

Pope Francis invites us to live our consecration with joy. This is the sign of the authentic fraternity lived in community. The Pontiff expects the consecrated life to have the capacity “of awakening the world” like the eyes of the prophet who scrutinizes history and interprets events in order to recognize the new ways that the Spirit suggests. Charisms are not “utopias” from a museum to be obstinately maintained in our lives, but spiritual gifts which are able to recognize and create “other places” for the evangelical logic of a gift, acceptance and fraternity. These places, born as the expression of evangelical charity and charismatic creativity (in religious communities, hospitals, schools, etc.) must become the leaven for constructing a society inspired by the Gospels.

Religious, as “experts in communion”, on which they are nourished every day, must make the “spirituality of communion” tangible, beginning with their own communities, by bringing about in its fullness the “mysticism of living together”, but also by forming links between the members of different Institutes in order to work together on common projects of formation, evangelisation and social activities. The future will not be constructed in isolation but in working and sharing together.

The Pope is seeking from Religious a continuous exodus from themselves in order to reach out to a humanity that is in need and wounded. Being enclosed risks being left “asphyxiated by little domestic squabbles”, while in announcing the Gospels: “You will find life giving life, hope giving hope and love giving love”.

The contemplative life is also encouraged to be open to constructing links of relationship between different monasteries in order to enrich each other mutually with an exchange of experiences of the life of prayer and take on the burden, even behind the grilles of the enclosure, of the problems of the world, and of those who are seeking a more intense spiritual life, and in supporting persecuted Christians and those who have need of moral or material support.

Beginning with the leadership given by the Pontiff, I hope to give some ideas about the practical choices in Crostarosan spirituality which will permit us to revive hope.

2. Christ our hope

Jesus is Lord! The joyful cry which flows from the look of faith upon our risen Lord is what has caused and fed the hope of the Christian people

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for two thousand years, as the Pope has reminded us in his encyclical Lumen Fidei:

“The clearest proof of the reliability of Christ’s love is to be found in his dying for our sake. If laying down one’s life for one’s friends is the greatest proof of love (cf. Jn 15:13), Jesus offered his own life for all, even for his enemies, to transform their hearts. This explains why the evangelists could see the hour of Christ’s crucifixion as the culmination of the gaze of faith; in that hour the depth and breadth of God’s love shone forth. […]

“Christ’s death discloses the utter reliability of God’s love above all in the light of his resurrection. As the risen one, Christ is the trustworthy witness, deserving of faith (cf. Rev 1:5; Heb 2:17), and a solid support for our faith. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile", says Saint Paul (1 Cor 15:17). Had the Father’s love not caused Jesus to rise from the dead, had it not been able to restore his body to life, then it would not be a completely reliable love, capable of illuminating also the gloom of death. When Saint Paul describes his new life in Christ, he speaks of "faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Clearly, this "faith in the Son of God" means Paul’s faith in Jesus, but it also presumes that Jesus himself is worthy of faith, based not only on his having loved us even unto death but also on his divine sonship. Precisely because Jesus is the Son, because he is absolutely grounded in the Father, he was able to conquer death and make the fullness of life shine forth. Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.

And so it is essential and decisive to keep firmly and vividly before us the centrality of this annunciation. This is because, as Pope Francis teaches us in Evangelium Gaudium: “A renewal of preaching can offer believers, as well as the lukewarm and the non-practising, new joy in the faith and fruitfulness in the work of evangelization. The heart of its message will always be the same: the God who revealed his immense love in the crucified and risen Christ. God constantly renews his faithful ones, whatever their age: “They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint” (Is 40:31). Christ is the “eternal Gospel” (Rev 14:6); he “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8), yet his riches and beauty are inexhaustible. He is for ever young and a constant source of

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newness. The Church never fails to be amazed at “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” (Rom 11:33). Saint John of the Cross says that “the thicket of God’s wisdom and knowledge is so deep and so broad that the soul, however much it has come to know of it, can always penetrate deeper within it”.7 Or as Saint Irenaeus writes: “By his coming, Christ brought with him all newness”.8 With this newness he is always able to renew our lives and our communities, and even if the Christian message has known periods of darkness and ecclesial weakness, it will never grow old. Jesus can also break through the dull categories with which we would enclose him and he constantly amazes us by his divine creativity” (n. 12).

The decisive point – the Pope has also told us – is “our being united to Him, and therefore to each other, and being with Him in order to be able to go out in His name (see Mk. 3:13-15). Our true strength is therefore in being nourished by His word and His body, being united to His sacrifice for us, adoring Him present in the Eucharist, and in fact, before every activity and every one of our plans, there must be the adoration which makes us truly free and gives us the criteria for our actions”. Christian spirituality, in fact, is different from a disincarnate spirituality, for it is letting the Lord work in our daily lives and transform us by the overwhelming power of His love.

3. Hope for everybody

The hope of which we are the witnesses is the very person of the Lord Jesus, His being in the midst of us forever, His promise of “that new and eternal world, in which we shall have conquered sorrow, violence and death, and the creature will be resplendent in his extraordinary beauty”. We are certainly not speaking of an ingenuous and illusory optimism or an indefinite and vague hope of a better tomorrow, but an encounter with the Living Lord which nourishes the “certainties” of faith and gives us cause for hope. In fact, Easter teaches us that evil and death are an inalienable part of human experience, but they are not the last word about our existence. “In clinging on to His Body we live, and in communion with His Body we finally reach the Heart of God. And only thus is death overcome and we are free and our life is hope”.

Christian hope is not simply a pious desire – it is a practical reality, and historic, personal and communitarian exercise. It inhabits and moulds our daily existence, bringing the expectations of mankind in contact with the very origin of life and justice, love and peace. Hoping means being disposed to glimpsing the mysterious work of God in time. While he clearly recognizes the negative weight of sin, Christian hope opens the sinner to the love of God which saves. And thus hope becomes certainty in God’s merciful embrace, an invitation to conversion, an opening of the mind and heart, a gift of the Spirit

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who is not distant from life, but who too is prompted to assume fragility and suffering in order to transfigure man into Christ.

Being unafraid to preserve and promote the “excess” of Christian hope, and bring the breath of life into the heart of every man, is part of the witness of the believer. In particular, it seems urgent to us today not to be silent about the eschatological nature of our faith, “which is proclaimed in the final words of the Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh and the life eternal”. Yes, they are the final words, but in some special way they are the most affirmative and decisive words of the entire Creed, precisely because they offer the key to the comprehension and solution of the most complex and decisive anthropological problems of existence, beginning with the sense of dying and therefore of the entire human existence as such”.

This hope must mould our whole person and our whole life, as we are called to be witnesses, and credible witnesses. We need our consecration to form us, personally and in community, as men and women of hope, by means of the following contents:

The look of Christ (within and outside the community) capable

of receiving the signs of grace and open to hope; The living memorial which translates into the Eucharistic

dimension; A heart which transmits to others that they can grow and be

free… 4. Religious life as a way of hope

Mother Celeste’s religious experience was consigned to us in her religious project: “Institute and Rules of the Most Holy Saviour contained in the Holy Gospels”. They clearly show the influence of the Carmelite rules according to which Mother Celeste began her experience of religious life, and even more those of the Visitandines, in vigour in Scala, whose normative structure was integrated in part into the new project. In their fundamental inspiration and main points they play a specific role. This specific role may be summed up as the imitation through the memorial of the Redeemer as the merciful love of the Father through the Spirit.

In this regard, the Prologue, which gives the reasons for the Institute by linking it to the “Intention of the Eternal Father”, is very clear: “With desire I have desired to give My Spirit to the world and to communicate it to My creatures endowed with reason, in order to live with them and in them until the end of the world. I gave them My Only-Begotten Son with infinite love, and through Him, I communicated to them My Divine Spirit, the Consoler, to deify them in life, justice, and truth, and to bind them all into My delight, in Him, the Word, the Son of Love: through Him comes all the outpouring of My

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mercy, justice and truth; through Him is eternal life. The world was made by My divine Word, and through Him all things live: in Him they are life, and He is the being and life of everything that is made, and in Him all things are one life of love and delight, and through Him, in Myself”.

It is opportune to point out here:

The theological basis of the Institute in the design of the Father; The Trinitarian vision of communication and communion of the

same design; The pneumatological and Christological perspectives closely

connected to each other.

The reason for the Institute is the living memorial of the merciful love which forms the basis and heart of the whole salvific plan: “so that My creatures may keep in mind the eternal charity with which I have loved them, I have been pleased to choose this Institute, so that it shall be a living memorial (“Viva Memoria”), to all the men of the world of everything that My Only-Begotten Son was pleased to do for their salvation in the space of the thirty three years that He lived on earth as a wayfarer. And His works have life in My sight and are of an infinite value. Therefore you, the souls who have been chosen for this enterprise, will be glorified together with Him on the day of eternity”.

If this passage is read in the light of the dominant notion of the 18th Century in regard to religious life, it is surprising for the memorial value that it places at the basis of consecration, a value which today both the magisterium and theology strongly confirm. The 18th Century vision, on the other hand, supports the notion of individual perfection, which was indispensable for making oneself safe from the dangers of the world.

It advocates a memorial which requires a full transformation into Christ: “Therefore, stamp His life on your spirit and the true resemblance to Him that comes from imitating Him. Be on earth living and inspired portraits of My beloved Son, for He alone is your Head, He alone is your beginning. You shall bear Him as the life of your heart, and as the completion of your beginning, as the Pastor of your flock, and as the Master of your spirit. Your life shall be regulated by the truths taught by Him in the Holy Gospels, in which all the treasures of heaven are hidden: the source of life, through which mankind, while still wayfarers, participate in the eternal riches of My beloved Son of Love, in whom they have their being and their life. And just as He has glorified Me in you, so are you glorified for Me in Him”.

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As Father Majorano so well reminds us in his studies we need to note that:

The memorial requires and is based on imitation: we need to be

“inspired living portraits” of Christ; It is not about being the copy of a model, but about a

participation brought about by the Spirit according to what we have mentioned previously;

In practice it means letting ourselves be regulated by the evangelical truths (the morning meditation is to be on the Gospel of the day);

It is all to the glory of the Father.

Everything then boils down to charity: “So let your spirit live in My divine love, by giving My Only-Begotten Son all the honour and glory; and let no one dare to usurp the title to themselves of founder of foundress in this Order, as this title belongs to My Only-Begotten alone. Therefore He shall be the Director of your souls. He shall obtain the Spirit for you, and He shall inspire the Consoler in you, who will illumine you and fill you with His gifts and virtues. And while ever you follow My will, then I promise to make a great number of My elect and dear friends flourish in this Order, and they shall be united and transformed into the life of My Only-Begotten Son and shall be My most dear children in Him, children of light and blessing who will bear fruit until the end of the world”.

May I be permitted a reference to Vita Consecrata: “By this profound "configuration" to the mystery of Christ, the consecrated life brings about in a special way that confessio Trinitatis which is the mark of all Christian life; it acknowledges with wonder the sublime beauty of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and bears joyful witness to his loving concern for every human being” (n. 16).

For Mother Celeste, it is the “living memorial” which determines structure, organisation, and the community’s daily rhythm and style of life, as everything must “remember” the Redeemer as merciful love. The fundamental attitudes (the nine virtues or spiritual rules), which are the practical ways in which we make our personal transformation into Christ, are the fruit of a loving contemplation which Christ our Sun causes to radiate out from us by means of the incessant study of the Gospels.

I shall limit myself to giving the most essential passages of the first spiritual rule regarding union and mutual charity:

After giving the passage from Jn. 15:12-13: “Hoc est praeceptum meum, ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexi vos. Maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet, ut animam suam ponat quis pro amicis suis”, Mother Celeste points

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out the nature of the gift given to us by the Redeemer: “I came down from heaven to give Myself entirely to you, and to give My life not only for My friends, but also for My enemies, to glorify My Father and for your salvation. So with the wisdom of My intellect I gave clarity and revelation of the eternal truths to human minds, obscured by the darkness of sin. I gave them My memory to remember Me in My former works of mercy, that I performed for My reasoning creatures. I gave My will, by loving you with the same divine love with which I love My heavenly Father, having given My own life for your eternal salvation.

The dynamics of this gift is given as the “norm” of our whole life: “This is My new commandment, that you love one another mutually as I have loved you. So give your neighbour all your soul: your intellect, uplifting her to My mercy for her benefit, and never to condemn her for any kind of evil. Give her your memory, and pardon her from your heart and do not remember the wrongs received, and repay her with both spiritual and temporal blessings. Give her your will, by loving her sincerely, treating her as you would wish others to treat you, desiring for her all the blessings possible. Give her your heart with its affections, for love of Me, having compassion for her in her afflictions, sickness and difficulties, both spiritual and corporal. Employ both your body and your senses for her benefit: your eyes to see her needs and never to observe her defects and actions; do not judge her in anything; your ears to listen to her troubles, your mouth to console her in her afflictions, and to instruct her in the eternal truths in her ignorance; help her and protect her. In substance, your body and your life should be ready to be sacrificed, if charity requires it for the sake of their eternal salvation, so that, as I have done, you may also do”.

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Our history and our pilgrimages …

The monastery of SCALA and its history

Sr. Giovana Lauritano, O.Ss.R., Scala

The history of the Monastery of Scala coincides in great part with the history of the origins of the Redemptoristine Order, and this is the reason why I will not spend too much time on narrating the events between the years 1724 (when the Crostarosa sisters arrived in Scala) and 1733 (the year they departed) because they are so well known. I shall try instead to describe, briefly, the events that preceded and followed the period of time

just mentioned.

THE FOUNDATION The noble priest Don Lorenzo Della Mura, a

Canon in the Cathedral of Scala, when he died in 1634, left all his property to establish a Conservatory for young people in the city. The project was completed in 1637. The aristocratic home of the Della Mura was adapted as a conservatory, a place was found for a little church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, and

many children were enrolled there. Through the interest and financial help of Father Tommaso Falcoia

of the Pious Workmen in Naples, and his Superior, Father Maurizio Filangieri, in May 1720 the Conservatory was transformed into a Monastery of the Visitation led by Mother M. Giuseppe Schisano of Naples. The Monastery, however, was not recognized by the Order of the Visitation because it had not been founded by a Visitandine as the Rule required. Later on this inconvenience would favour the transformation of the monastery from a Visitandine one to a Redemptoristine one.

In January 1724, on the advice of Father Falcoia, the three Crostarosa sisters arrived in Scala: Ursula, Giulia and Giovanna, who came from the Carmel of Marigliano, suppressed because of an abuse of power. In the following February, Giulia and her sisters put on the Visitandine habit, and she took the name of Sr. Maria Celeste of the Holy Desert. On 25th April 1725, while still a novice, after Communion, Sr. Celeste received the revelation of the Rules. The Lord made her understand his plans “for a new Institute that He wanted to place in the world by means of her…” and which was to be a Living Memorial of His love for humanity. The work, after many varied and

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tumultuous events, came into being with the spiritual direction of Falcoia, who in the meantime had become the Bishop of Castellammare, and the illuminated help of Don Alphonsus M. de’ Liguori, who, in 1730, after listening to Sr. Celeste and the Sisters, confirmed that the Work was really from God. On 13th May 1731, the solemnity of Pentecost, the Religious professed the new Rule and on the feast of the Transfiguration, on 6th August, they put on the dark red habit and the blue mantle, and took the religious name of the Most Holy Saviour.

On 3rd October of the same year, in the Monastery refectory, Sr. M. Celeste had a vision in which Jesus appeared to her with St. Francis of Assisi and Alphonsus de’ Liguori. Jesus indicated to her that Alphonsus would be the head of a new Institute of missionaries that would be dedicated to the poor just like St. Francis. After further revelations about the will of God, on 9th of November the Redemptorist Missionaries were founded in Scala, having the nuns’ hospice as their first house.

The Lord confirmed the Work with miraculous manifestations. From September to December in 1732, in the consecrated Host solemnly exposed in the Monastery Church, in full sight of the nuns, the Fathers, the people and the Bishop there were apparitions of the instruments of the Passion of Christ: the cross, the crown of thorns, the lance and the nails … St. Alphonsus then made use of these things to design the emblem of the double Redemptorist Institute. The ostensorium is still preserved in the monastery.

The change was very soon accompanied by tensions due to the modifications that Falcoia had introduced into the original draft of the Rules. Sr. Celeste was required to accept the rule modified by him, break off her contact with Silvestro Tosquez and make a vow of letting herself be directed spiritually only by Falcoia. Sr. Celeste accepted the first two conditions but refused the third, because she felt that doing so would go against her freedom of conscience. On 14th May 1733, the Community Chapter, presided by Falcoia, expelled Sr. Celeste and with her, on 25th May, her two sisters also left the Monastery. Mother Celeste died in Foggia in the Monastery she founded, on 14th September 1755, venerated by all as the ‘holy prioress”.

AFTER SR. CELESTE… On 8th June 1750, thanks to the work of St. Alphonsus, Pope Benedict

XIV granted approval of the Rule, and the Monastery of Scala thus became the first community of a monastic Order with solemn vows and assumed, like the masculine Institute, the title of the Most Holy Redeemer.

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Meanwhile St. Alphonsus, who had now become the Bishop of St. Agatha of the Goths (BN), called some Sisters from Scala in 1766 (including Sr. M. Raffaella De Vito) to the foundation of a Redemptoristine Monastery in that city. And then from there the Order was propagated in Austria and then the whole world..

The first years of the 1800s saw a re-flourishing of the now reduced community of Scala thanks to the zeal and sanctity of Sr. M. Serafina Gambardella (of Amalfi) who held the office of Superior for very many years. The Immaculate Virgin appeared to the holy Superior, preoccupied as she was with the fate of the monastery, and reassured her by saying that the Monastery would never be destroyed and, in spite of its vicissitudes, would always keep going. In the community room we still have a portrait on canvas of Sr. M. Serafina, who died in an odour of sanctity. Moreover, our Monastery, which survived the anticlerical laws of the times, was able to welcome the remaining Religious of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Cataldo in Scala in 1811 when they instead were forced to close. The Benedictines brought with them much of the sacred furniture of their church, including the miraculous statue of Our Lady of the Rosary (the signs of the miracle of the lightning that flashed from its eyes for the salvation of the Benedictine Monastery). These days the statue is found in the foyer of our Monastery.

In 1855 news arrived in Scala about the festivities which were held in Foggia for the first centenary of the death of their Foundress. The Superior, Sr. M. Alphonsa of the Will of God wrote and asked the Superior of Foggia for some news about Sr. Celeste, as in Scala all memory of her had been lost. When Foggia wrote back, a portrait was enclosed with a relic that Sr. Alphonsa placed in the choir, putting the Sisters under the protection of Mother Celeste, declaring them her daughters…

Following the Union of Italy in 1861, and the laws of the suppression of the religious Institutes, the Monastery found itself in great economic difficulties because much of their land and property was confiscated. In 1895, the community of Scala had dwindled to only 5 Sisters. Thanks to another Sister from Amalfi, Sr. M. Immacolata Camera, the Monastery managed to avoid suppression. She came from a noble family in Amalfi from which she was able to get food and help for the Sisters, and also from the Redemptorists. And even to brigands who sought help, the holy Superior responded with charity by giving them something to eat. In the upper corridor of the Monastery, which is nowadays called the “cloister of the Immaculate”, we are told that she had a vision of Our Lady urging the Sisters to become saints. We are also told of an attack by the demon, who, under the form of a big dog, bit her on the arm. In the archive we preserve the document by two doctors who attest the presence of these two bites on her

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arm. And we also preserve a portrait of Sr. M. Immacolata on canvas in our community room.

In 1902 the Redemptorists of Bavaria ransomed the Monastery from the Treasury. Father Willem Van Rossum received the task from the then Father General of the Redemptorists, Father Patrick Murray, and sent 3 Belgian Sisters from the Monastery of Malines and 2 from Louvain. Amongst them was the Superior, Sr. M. Celeste of the Will of God, in secular life Jeanne Van Eeckhoudt, who died in 1922 in an odour of sanctity after restructuring the house, receiving numerous vocations and, in fact, renewing the community in number and sanctity.

In 1933, exactly two centuries after the expulsion of Sr. Celeste from

the Monastery, two Sisters went from Scala to Foggia, including its Superior, Sr. M. Filomena Damide, a Belgian, to help that community which was dying.

THE ‘RETURN’ OF MOTHER CELESTE TO SCALA

In 1962, while the Vatican II Council was opening in Rome, the Redemptorist Father Domenico Capone preached a retreat to the community of Scala… Reading the autograph manuscript of the primitive Rule of the then Venerable, he was greatly impressed by its richness and spiritual profundity. This was the beginning of the rediscovery of the “maternal” light… From his studies and subsequent research he achieved the revision in 1985 of the Constitution according to the dictates of the Council and especially in the light of Crostarosan spirituality.

In 1989, 4 Polish Sisters left Scala

after their formation to found a Monastery in Poland, from which their Order has spread and is continuing to spread further in Eastern Europe. In September 2009 three Sisters began their mission of ‘re-founding’ the Monastery established by St. Alphonsus at St. Agatha of the Goths. At the present time our community consists of 15 members, including a novice and a Sister on temporary vows.

We hope to be good disciples of this “mistress of life” who is our

history, and above all true disciples of that Master who can help us to glean from past events the seeds of unity patiently cultivated by so many women who have preceded us, thus leading us forward to a truly prophetic future…

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Alphonsus Maria de Liguori and Maria Celeste Crostarosa

- a profound and sincere friendship

Sr. Anna Maria Ceneri, O.Ss.R., S. Agata dei Goti

Together with my Community I am particularly grateful for having been invited to speak about St. Alphonsus and the figure of Mother Maria Celeste. It does not often happen that we find

these two foundational pillars of our double Institute of the Most Holy Redeemer working together. Mother Crostarosa, a mystic, writer and foundress, “a great woman and servant of God”, (the expression is by Antonio Tannoia, St. Alphonsus’ first biographer), 3 has unjustly remained for too long in the shadows (however, while we were transcribing the text of the conference, we received the great news of her beatification on the 18th June). Happily things are changing, as Father Majorano is editing the critical Edition of the “Crostarosan Texts and Studies”, and already 8 volumes have been published; and in addition there is a growing interest in her spiritual proposal, which is also becoming ever better known and appreciated by means of the numerous and significant initiatives promoted by the monasteries of the Order.

However, the sincere relationship of friendship and sharing which was

established between them both has not been given its proper emphasis by the historians. And yet the meeting between the two of them was decisive in both their lives. The special thing was that God caused them to meet while neither of them knew exactly what was to take place between them. God’s action made them find their charisms and put them into action, with the result that they illumined each other. We are therefore going to take a look at the facts to shed light on the events that affected the lives of both of our protagonists, even though the space that has been granted to me does not permit me to enter into details. I will begin by saying that as a Redemptoristine nun, rather than speak about history, I prefer to be a witness in my narrative.

In May 1730, Alphonsus M. de Liguori, either by chance or by the

“divine disposition”, arrived in Scala for the first time, and when he entered

3 Antonio M. TANNOIA, Della vita ed Istituto del venerabile servo di Dio Alfonso M.a Liguori, vescovo di S. Agata de’ Goti e Fondatore della Congregazione de’ Preti Missionarii del SS. Redentore (Of the life and Institute of the venerable servant of God, Alphonsus Maria Liguori, the Bishop of St. Agatha of the Goths and Founder of the Congregation of the Missionary Priests of the Most Holy Redeemer), 4 books, Naples, at Vincenzo Orsini, 1798-1802, 1. I., p. 65, footnote 1.

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the district the young missionary could not possibly imagine that the lofty cluster of buildings – that is to say the noble “Della Mura” palace, which on the right hand side dominates the entry to the city, then called the “door to Scala” – was a monastery which was to have a powerful influence on his life.

The monastery was founded in 1720 as a Conservatory, for the

education of middle-class girls in the city. The local Bishop, Mons. Guerriero, 4 had entrusted it to two missionaries, Father Maurizio Filangieri and Father Tommaso Falcoia, who introduced the Visitandine rule there, and took over the spiritual direction.

Into this monastery, at Falcoia’s suggestion, in January 1724, came Sr. M. Celeste Crostarosa, 5 together with her two sisters. Sr. M. Celeste was favoured by God, right from her childhood, with extraordinary gifts, and a year after her entry, on 25th April 1725, while she was still a novice, she was illumined by God. She writes in her Autobiography:

“After receiving the Eucharist… her soul experienced that transmutation of her being into that of Our Lord Jesus Christ. … she saw our Lord Jesus Christ, who united His most sacred hands, feet and side with those of the aforesaid nun, but not as a human body, but with a beauty and a divine splendour … she experienced all the precious blessings of the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ: they were stamped on her heart. And then she was given to understand about a new Institute, that the Lord would erect in the world by means of her…” 6

God was asking her to make a new foundation centred on the imitation of Christ, which would have the aim of becoming the living memorial of the Redeemer, and of living in fraternal charity according to the Rules contained in the Holy Gospels which Sr. Celeste herself would draft. But such a project was forced to remain on paper due to the complex difficulties 7 which arose inside and outside the monastery.

When Alphonsus de Liguori came to Scala, he stayed for a month at

Saint Mary of the Mountains, 1080 metres above sea level, combining his rest

4 Mons. Nicola Guerriero (1667-1732) was the Bishop of Scala and Ravello from the 6th of April 1718. See S. MAJORANO, L’imitazione per la memoria del Salvatore. Il messaggio spirituale di Suor Maria Celeste Crostarosa (1696-1755) (Imitation through the memorial of the Saviour. The spiritual message of Sister Maria Celeste Crostarosa (1695-1755)), Rome 1978, p. 64 (Italian edition). 5 Giulia Crostarosa was born in Naples on 31st October 1696, one month after Alphonsus. Her father, Giuseppe, a lawyer, and her mother Paola Caldari, both belonged to noble families. 6 M. C. CROSTAROSA, Autobiography, edited by S. Majorano and A. Simeoni, Crostarosan Texts and Studies 3, Materdomini 1998, p. 131 (Italian edition: see Chapter 19). 7 The principal obstacle was Tommaso Falcoia who considered M. Celeste as deluded and a visionary, even though he had an examination made in Naples of the rules she wrote, done by a committee of theologians who approved them. See S. MAJORANO, L’Imitazione, quoted above, pp. 68-83.

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time with the evangelisation of the shepherds who were living there abandoned. He returned to Scala in the September of the same year for the novena of the Crucifix in the cathedral and on that occasion he gave the Conservatory of the Conception their Spiritual Exercises. At the request of the local Bishop, who was his friend, he met the Sisters in the monastery, and in particular Sr. M. Celeste, to whom he gave the obedience of making him a report about all the events regarding the revelations about the new Institute.

In reality, Alphonsus had come to Scala convinced he would have to

deal with a “deluded nun”, according to the gossip which was circulating in Naples on account of this Sister.

The meeting he had with her and the other Sisters, which right from

the beginning was on the subject of the new religious project led him to an opposite conclusion: “the work was of God and not an illusion as it had been judged to be”, and then he involved himself in it personally and helped bring it about. He favoured unanimity amongst the community, sought and obtained the approval of the Bishop, and the exercises he was preaching to the Sisters became a preparation for the future change. Sister Celeste writes in her Autobiography:

“And so the same Fr. Alphonsus was so fired by holy joy and zeal for

the glory of the Lord, that he could not hold back his jubilation”. 8 We know very well that St. Alphonsus was a man of great rectitude and

with an intimate relationship with God, and because of this he immediately found a spiritual harmony with Sister Celeste, and so a sincere and profound friendship began between them, as is witnessed by the correspondence which passed between them. Nor must it be forgotten that it was Alphonsus who always preserved the letters he received from Sr. Crostarosa, adding his brief notes as usual to them to indicate their contents. 9 This very same report by Sister Maria Celeste was found among the letters of the Saint at the time of his death in 1787, and it leads us to deduce that since he received it in September 1730, he must have preserved it for 57 years together with other letters and notes from Celeste. 10

An episode that seems taken from mediaeval legends has been passed down to us by the Sisters. It was the first time St. Alphonsus went to the monastery accompanied by Mazzini, and the Superior Maria Angela did not

8 M. C. CROSTAROSA, Autobiography, as quoted, p. 193 (see Chapter 37). 9 M. C. CROSTAROSA, Le Lettere (The Letters), edited by R. Librandi and A. Valerio. Crostarosan Texts and Studies 1, Materdomini 1996; see the Introduction, pp. 44, 47-50, 53. 10 See D. CAPONE, Suor Celeste Crostarosa e Sant’Alfonso de Liguori. Incontri – spiritualità (Sister Celeste Crostarosa and Saint Alphonsus de Liguori. Meetings – Spirituality) Materdomini 1991, pp. 52-53.

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want to let them leave without first giving them a cake for their journey. The Sister who was the cook gathered all the ingredients, prayed to Our Lady seeking her help, and then went into an ecstasy. When she returned to herself she found the cake already prepared and cooked, and the fire was not even lit. When they gave it to the two missionaries they said: “Eat it, because Our Lady has prepared it!” 11

When he left Scala he continued on with his habitual apostolic activity. But in the meantime he kept in contact with the nuns of Scala. On the 15th October he received a bundle of letters from Scala, as the Sisters in common or in private had written to him, and in one of them Sister Maria Celeste said:

“Most beloved Father in the Lord, never has there ceased for us the

consolation that our Spouse has shared with us by means of you … My Father, I find you always my companion in my poor and cold prayers, and united to your spirit I make my communions and thirst for company, but even more is my joy at seeing that all our community had a memorial of consolation from it. May the Lord forever bless this friendship of ours for His glory and honour”. 12

St. Alphonsus’ state of mind was no different, and in fact he wrote back

in terms just as intense: “May Jesus and Mary always possess our hearts! … On my Saint’s Day,

Saint Teresa, I received your first few letters. I was very pleased when I saw just the covering envelope, because I had not yet seen who had sent it to me… Now quite a few days have passed since my stay in Scala, and yet I still have such a fresh memory of you, as if we had only parted yesterday… When I remember you, I somehow feel as if I had not gone away, but had become closer united to God, and I especially want you to know for our common consolation, that the verses in your letters have turned out to be arrows that have wounded me with God… Every so often I turn to where you are and say to you: “Love, O souls in love, loved Jesus!” 13

On the 13th May, the solemnity of Pentecost, the Order of the Most Holy

Saviour 14 was begun. In October of the same year, on the vigil of St. Francis of Assisi, Sister Maria Celeste had a new and special vision:

11 J. FAVRE, La vénérable Marie-Céleste Crostarosa (The venerable Maria Celeste Crostarosa), Saint-Etienne, Paris 1931, p. 163. 12 See M. C. CROSTAROSA, Le Lettere (The Letters), as quoted above, pp. 76-77. 13 ST. ALPHONSUS MARIA DE LIGUORI, Carteggio (Correspondence) I, 1724-1743, edited by G. Orlandi, Rome 2004, pp. 116-117. 14 The name it had until the Holy See changed it to the Most Holy Redeemer, when it approved it in 1749.

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“He showed Himself to her as Our Lord Jesus Christ together with the seraphic Father St. Francis in a light of glory; and Father Alphonsus de Liguori was present there. Then the Lord said to the Religious: “This soul is chosen as the Head of this My Institute: he will be the first Superior in the men’s Congregation.” And the aforesaid nun saw in God this Work already done and put into effect”. 15

On the 4th October, the vision was completed with the revelation of the

details of the Congregation’s religious and apostolic life. But Celeste was not able to communicate them to Alphonsus straight away because she first needed to receive the permission of her spiritual director, Mons. Falcoia – he had become the Bishop of Castellammare di Stabia – and while she was waiting she sent him a letter with some indications:

“My Father, … I have to tell you some great things about my conscience

and yours and to the glory of God, but for now God does not want me to describe them to you. Say your prayers, and in the heart of Jesus and Mary, I will speak to you; soon I hope to tell you everything, and do nothing else in my poor prayers than pray for you and tell Mother Mary to dispose you to the will of her beloved Son. I am in deep thought because of you; I can[not] tell you anything more for now. We expect Falcoia any moment in Scala: pray to God to give him the light to fulfil His will…” 16

One month later, St. Alphonsus went to Scala and had a discussion with

Sister Maria Celeste. In the process of the canonisation of St. Alphonsus, Father Mazzini stated that St. Alphonsus informed him of Sister Maria Celeste’s project in these terms:

“The Servant of God told me: Sister Maria Celeste (she was a Servant of

God in that Monastery) told me that I should leave Naples, and found here an Institute adapted solely to giving Missions in the Villages, and rural areas… as this was the will of God…” 17

We are looking here at a witness of exceptional value, Don Giovanni

Mazzini, who was present at the facts, and he asserted that Alphonsus emerged distraught from that meeting and even began to weep, so great was the shock. St. Alphonsus was not timid but prudent: Sister Celeste was a serious person, he was convinced, and the founding of the Sisters proved it,

15 B. D’ORAZIO, La Ven.le Madre Sr. Maria Celeste Crostarosa. Autobiografia (The Venerable Mother Sr. Maria Celeste Crostarosa. Autobiography, [Casamari, 1965], p. 186. 16 M. C. CROSTAROSA, Le Lettere (The Letters), as quoted above, pp. 99-100. 17 Summarium super dubio…, 26-27, in Positio super introductione causae…, Rome 1796; and Summarium super virtutibus, Rome 1806, pp. 125-126. (Also in Analecta III, p. 27 – Tr.).

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and if that was the will of God, he would have to do it at any cost. And so, receiving the Sister’s revelation caused him to have a series of consultations with various masters of the spirit, in other words, with those who could say authoritatively that this was the will of God. The trouble was that when news of the revelations spread, he was treated as the slave of a “visionary nun”, and Alphonsus had wasted his breath repeating: “I am not governed by the visions, but by the Gospels”.

He was confirmed in his thoughts by his spiritual director, Father Tommaso Pagano; he also had the approval of the Dominican Father Fiorillo, and the favourable opinion of Monsignor Falcoia.

“When Alphonsus became certain,” says Tannoia, “of the will of God, he

took heart and found his courage, and made Jesus Christ a total sacrifice of the city of Naples.” 18

On the 9th November 1732, in the nuns’ hospice, he founded the

Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer in Scala. St Alphonsus later wrote: “These rocks of Scala give me more consolation than all the delights of

the world.” 19 The decisive moment for St. Alphonsus was the certainty given to him

by his spiritual directors, that the foundation of the missionary Institute was truly the will of God, first of all made manifest by the visions of Sister Maria Celeste. And so, in his notebook: Things of conscience, in the Spring of 1732 he wrote:

The institute “where called by revelation [and] by Spiritual Fathers without it being able to be put more in doubt.” 20

The Lord showed His great pleasure with an amazing miracle. During the Eucharistic adoration in the monastery church, the nuns in the choir, and those present there, St. Alphonsus and his first companions, all saw what took place in the ostensorium – the formation of symbols with beams of light, and a cross on three little hills with the instruments of the Passion. Even the local Bishop, once he had been advised, was able to see this miracle, also because it was repeated a number of times from September to December 1732. St. Alphonsus took those symbols as the emblem of his Institute.

18 A. M. TANNOIA, Della vita e istituto (Of the life and institute), as quoted above, p. 66. 19 T. Rey-Mermet, Il santo del secolo dei lumi (The saint of the century of light), Città Nuova Editrice, Rome 1983, p. 363. 20 Cose di coscienza (Things of conscience), 56. AGHR 050109/355 (SAM/09).

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Another sign from heaven appeared for the new little community of missionaries gathered round St. Alphonsus. One night, when they got up to pray, they saw the monastery of the nuns ringed round with fire and flames, and when one of them wanted to give the alarm and put them out, St. Alphonsus calmed him down by say that the fire was the ardent prayers of the nuns, because, since they were young, they were able to do the vigil of adoration to the Most Holy Sacrament. 21

And yet, in the year following the foundation of the Redemptorist

Institute from the feminine branch, the history that followed was a dramatic one. Tensions began to be created within the community of missionaries because of a certain Silvestro Tosquez, (who wanted to join St. Alphonsus), who also created conflicts in the community of the nuns, and Mons. Falcoia increased the divisions, by blaming Sr. Celeste as the cause of it all. St. Alphonsus too, who misunderstood the profound motivations of Sr. Celeste, took the side of Falcoia and wrote her a very severe letter, so as to bring her back to her spiritual director and call her back to humility. 22 And Rey-Mermet, in his life of St. Alphonsus says that this letter was a harangue by the lawyer Liguori on behalf of his client Falcoia. In 1733, Sr. Celeste and her sisters were forced to leave the monastery of Scala. Rey-Mermet continues:

“For Falcoia… an absolutist and highly emotional priest, the way he rid

himself of Celeste in order to preserve his position as a spiritual director… and persecuted Celeste with a kind of exterminating fury, after already having removed her from her spiritual path, was a stain on the memory of this man of God. If Alphonsus had been in Scala between April – May 1733, he would certainly have intervened (and perhaps effectively) in favour of her with whom he would have continued to maintain the bond of friendship and a reciprocal veneration.” 23

After the death of Falcoia, and especially on the occasion of a mission to Foggia in 1745-1746, (Mother Celeste had founded a monastery in that city, and died there in 1755 in an odour of sanctity), the relationship between Celeste and Alphonsus was repaired and intensified on the former basis of trust and esteem. And the other Redemptorists of the first generation, beginning with St. Gerard Majella, had a great esteem for Mother Celeste and considered the nuns as being “of our own institute”. 24

21 M. C. CROSTAROSA, Autobiography, quoted above, p. 217. 22 ST. ALPHONSUS MARIA DE LIGUORI, Carteggio (Correspondence), I, as quoted above, pp. 211-221. 23 T. REY-MERMET, as quoted above, p. 356. 24 G. CAIONE, Gerardo Maiella, appunti biografici di un suo contemporaneo (Gerard Maiella, biographical notes by one of his contemporaries), Materdomini 1997, p. 85.

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In conclusion, the meeting between the two of them permitted Celeste to bring about God’s plan, and St. Alphonsus to devote himself once and for all to putting it into effect. He did not take part in formulating the project of the nuns’ foundation, while the rules dictated by God to Sister Celeste were assumed as the starting point for the foundation of the missionaries, as we can discover in the documentation. 25

Father Domenico Capone writes in his conclusion of his studies in Radici:

“That generation of the 1750s and also the 1760s very clearly re-evoked, during the cause of the beatification of Alphonsus, the originality of the message and the sanctity of the Sister. In reality the idea and the value that was grasped by St. Alphonsus in 1730 at St. Mary of the Mountains of Scala… was indicated to him as a practical project and the will of God for him, Alphonsus, just as it was for Sister Celeste. This faith and obedience sustained him constantly… but his first light came from Sister Maria Celeste. It was an historic fact, and historic was the start of the movement following that fact, and the history cannot be denied”. 26

25 See Majorano, L’Imitazione (The Imitation), as quoted above, pp. 72-75. 26 Domenico CAPONE – Sabatino MAJORANO, I redentoristi e le redentoriste, Le Radici (The Redemptorists and the Redemptoristines. The Origins), Valsele Tipografica, Materdomini.

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Welcome to the Monastery of the Most Holy Saviour,

Foggia, 2nd August, 2015

Sr. Angela Severo, OSsR, Foggia

Dearest Sisters

and Redemptorist Brothers,

We welcome you with great joy, and with great enthusiasm we present you with the charism of our Mother Foundress, Sister Maria Celeste Crostarosa of the Order of the Redemptoristine Nuns, who inspired the masculine branch of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.

Mother Maria Celeste Crostarosa was born in Naples on 31st October

1696 and died in Foggia on 14th September 1755. She was a Mystic Woman of the 1700s, through her great human and ecclesiastical contribution. She had a charism which came from the Source of all the gifts, which is the Holy Spirit, and which were granted for the edification of the body of Christ which is the Church. These were gifts which were destined for the Constitution of a new Religious Family, in which the religious charism was to be incarnated and passed on. Our Foundress is the first witness and guarantee of the charism which our Religious Order is to keep alive throughout time. And so she said: “The world is not enough for me to draw a long breath, but in the heart of my Redeemer I can find my every desire. Drawing a long breath. Here is a heart which feels bigger than the world, and only the fullness of Christ can fill it”. In this fullness is her liberty. Receiving the spiritual inheritance of Mother Crostarosa constitutes a treasure of the whole Church.

The spiritual journey of Mother Maria Celeste leads to a project of a

religious Community centred on the mystery of Christ, and it is a Biblical, Evangelical, Eucharistic and Marian journey. Another aspect of Crostarosan spirituality is the Trinitarian intimacy in which she wishes to espouse our entire humanity, beginning with her fellow Sisters, because this is what God wants of her.

Who is a Redemptoristine? What is her mission? What is her charism?

What is her spirituality? Her specific nature? A Redemptoristine Nun has been called by the Father to be a woman completely orientated to the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. She immerses herself in her interior activity and seeks the Lord with all the ardour of her heart; her search is

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without interruptions, and everything in her favours this searching for God; once she is immersed in God she can be free in her spirit and radiate light, warmth and love, and reach her brothers and sisters who live in the world as a channel of grace. This is the Redemptoristine Nuns, who exercises her mission of apostolate with enthusiasm and joy, by whom all the prayer intentions reach the Heart of God and God reaches her brothers and sisters in whatever their necessity. Her charism is to be a “Living Memorial” and being a Living Memorial means being transformed into a living portrait of Jesus, having His same sentiments, loving with His same heart, having like a transplanted heart, when the Redemptoristine becomes His Living Memorial, and then her heart beats in unison with the Heart of Christ; and then miracles of charity happen and everything becomes a miracle of love, because charity is a miracle of love, and a miracle of the heart, and charity rejoices the universe, and charity restores happiness. It is a sublime gift of love which the soul in grace manages to perceive in the depths of her heart and she makes great steps in perfection. She needs to give thanks for the many gifts that the consecrated person received from the Lord and nourish gratitude and love. Her first rendition of thanks id being a daughter of God, having received the call to the consecrated life, to the contemplative life, a sublime gift, a gift to the Church, because it is a gift of the Holy Spirit, praise be to the Trinity.

The Redemptoristine is a Woman consecrated to be the womb of

humanity. And as a Redemptoristine she really becomes a “Living Memorial” of Christ the Redeemer. In her prayers she feels the need to expand herself even outside the monastery to those who come knocking at the door of her heart… And for us what is the no. 1 social work par excellence is prayer. It is a prayer which reaches out by means of the gift of grace, which we received every day in the Word and the Eucharist and which reaches every brother and sister scattered all over the world. It is a prayer of the greatest universal fullness which neglects no one. This is the cloistered Sister, this is the Redemptoristine Nuns who in the fullness of time is on the Holy Mountain with Christ Jesus.

In fact, our meetings with groups of single persons take place right in

our church, where the Eucharistic Jesus is always solemnly exposed. Our monastery is open to whoever are in sorrow and anguish, and to those who have lost hope, who are in desperation, and who no longer feel the joy of living. Our monastery is open to families in crisis, to young people on drugs, to young people who have lost their dignity as women, to all those who humanly and spiritually have no direction in their faith and are dreadfully in darkness and desperation. To all these brothers and sisters we offer the warmth of our prayers, our true friendship and give them hope so that their

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return to God becomes reconciliation and peace. May the welcome and understanding that we offer them help to bring them to conversion, so that by means of their sensitivity of conscience they may notice the Spirit working in them and be open to grace and welcome Jesus into their lives, with a total renewal in faith and mercy.

50 years ago the prayer and sacrifice of cloistered nuns was lived in

silence and a total hiddenness, offering their own lives in favour of humanity. But today, with the Vatican II Council and us opening ourselves more widely to our own charism, we have been led to have a more direct contact with our brothers and sisters and its is precisely by means of these meetings that the marvels of God happen, with a return to Christ. Every Sister in the monastery is like a seed which becomes an ear of wheat, and the leaven which ferments the mass and, while remaining before the Lord, intercedes in favour of humanity and for the Holy Church.

Dearest Sisters and Brothers, we cannot be silent about a very great joy

that we have in our hearts, since very soon our Mother Foundress, Maria Celeste Crostarosa, will be proclaimed Blessed, so rejoice and be glad with us, because she will be the first Blessed in Foggia. ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA! Christ is truly Risen Alleluia!

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The History of the Redemptoristines

in Dublin

Monica Boggan, O.Ss.R., Dublin

In 1830 the Order of the Most Holy Redeemer spread from Italy over the Alpes and was officially installed in Vienna. From this monastery soon several new communities were founded, so in 1841 in Bruges. In 1858, Mother Marie-Philomene, Prioress of the Redemptoristine Monastery in Bruges, where also some young Irish women had entered, received a letter from a friend in Dublin telling her about a vacant house, dedicated by the will of a priest to house religious sisters, Mother Philomene immediately contacted Fr. Louis Buggenoms C.Ss.R. who was living at this time at Bishop Eaton, Liverpool. He hurried over to Dublin to assess the property’s potential as a possible home for a contemplative community. He returned a month later with Mother Philomene and another sister from Bruges, the thirty-five year old Marie Jeanne de la Croix. Despite finding some obstacles, the sisters decided to make a foundation if the ecclesiastical authorities agreed. After having received the assent of the local bishop, the sisters arrived in Dublin in spring 1959.

On their arrival the 7 founding sisters discovered in dismay, that very

little renovation had been done in the Sacred Heart house which should become their monastery. However, Sister Jeanne de la Croix energetically took matters in hand and directed the builders in making the building suitable for a Monastery of Redemptoristine Nuns. On 9th March 1859, the sisters moved into the, as yet, incomplete convent and consequently, the first days were difficult. The only habitable room served as chapel, refectory, kitchen and sleeping quarters and sisters slept on the ground with bundles of straw for pillows. They attended Mass in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street. Gifts for the new monastery began to trickle in and this cheered the sisters as they stepped around ladders and piles of building rubble. The Sisters put on their red and blue Redemptoristine habits for the first time on the feast of the Annunciation, 25th March 1859. This house in Drumcondra could only be a temporary solution to satisfy the sisters’ requirements since it quickly proved too small for the needs of a growing community. Consequently, a contract was signed in 1871 for the building of a new, larger monastery on the site formerly intended for Newman’s Catholic University but later rejected in favour of another site. On Thursday, 18th of July 1872, the stone which had been blessed by twenty-four bishops for the Catholic University was, instead, laid as the foundation stone

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of the Redemptoristine monastery. In 1875 the sisters could move into their new home.

The Monastery was a miniature model of Bruges. There were over 40 cells in the Monastery. The highest number of Sisters in the Monastery was 38. The beautiful gothic Chapel was like a little Cathedral. The Chapel was in keeping with Redemptoristine tradition and depicts the story of Celeste and Alphonsus on the high walls of the sanctuary.

In 1897 the community, in the meantime 38 Redemptoristines,

granted the wish of the Redemptorists in England and sent 6 sisters to Clapham in London for a new foundation.

Years later, in 1968, another Irish Redemptoristine, Sr. M. Assumpta,

left the convent in Dublin in order to help the very diminished community in Vienna. Later she went with the last sisters of this convent to the monastery in Ried, Austria, where she died in 2003.

In the year 2ooo, the new monastery was built to facilitate the needs of a modern community. It was opened on the 2nd of May. Situated on the grounds of the convent, it therefore remains in the heart of Dublin and plays a pivotal role in the local community. At present, there are 16 Sisters in our community. There are now 81 Sisters buried in the cemetery27.

27 The History is sourced from A Hidden Mystic by Honor McCabe O.P

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Redemptoristine Nuns Philippines

Redemptoristine Nuns Cebu

When we talk about how the

Redemptoristines -Cebu got started, we never forget to mention Legaspi, the first founding

Remptoristine monastery in the Philippines., and we can always remember with gratitude people who became instruments for the contemplative presence of Redemptoristines in the country.

Looking to the past with gratitude The Redemptoristines sprouted from the community of Liguori,

Missouri, U.S.A. The four valiant Nuns: Sr. Joan Calver, O.Ss.R., Sr. Rose Marie Schnell O.Ss.R (+2012), Sr. Nanette Durjam, O.Ss.R., Sr. Mary Ann Philipps O.Ss.R. (+2001), opened the door for new vocations in the Philippines, especially in the Bicol Region.

The Redemptorist Father wholeheartedly welcomed and supported us since the beginning.

Sr. Alice Marie Agosto was the first fruit of vocation in Legaspi, the first one who made her solemn profession in Legaspi.

The Redemptorists as well as friends and people from the region liked to visit the sisters whose “monastery became a sanctuary of silence, prayer and contemplation”, where the Nuns are called to be a Living Memory in the heart of the Bicol Region. According to the Constitutions “we never separate prayer from study (C 105). In communion with the Redeemer, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we pray always without losing heart. ( C 43)” The work in the house, the garden and the different ateliers followed Constitution 72: “We have received life as a gift of God and we sustain it by work.”

Community life and celebrations follow the principle: “Living in love and for love burning continuously until My fire becomes your fire.”

All this attracted people to live as Associates of the Redemptoristines who wish to live the spirituality of the Order in their secular life.

History: The Foundation Story of the Redemptoristines Cebu

1992 – The Moment of Grace Fr. Ramon Fruto, C.Ss.R., at that time the Vice-Provincial of the

Redemptorists, Cebu, invited the Redemptoristines in Legaspi to come over to the Visavas Region.

The Council of 1992 with Sr. Rose Marie as Prioress responded with joy to that invitation to have Redemptoristine Nuns in Cebu. Because of the lack

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of members of the Legaspi community (around 1990 her were 2 American Sisters, five professed Philippine Sisters and four novices), they decided to establish an extension house in Cebu, to be a house of formation, and they commissioned Sr. Alice Marie Agosto as formator and administrator.

Our American Sisters went back to the founding monastery at different

times: -Sr. Joan Calver was asked to be in the Viva Memoria Commission

- Sr. Nanette got sick and needed treatment in the U.S.A. - Sr. Mary Ann and Sr. Rose Marie returned to the U.S.A. later.

At June 2, 1992 some Sisters from the Legaspi community arrived with Sr. Alice Marie in Cebu City, but they returned after a few days to their monastery, leaving her behind to take charge of the candidates. The community, then consisting of Sr. Alice Marie, five postulants and some aspirants, lived temporarily in a rented house in Doña Rita Village. Sisters of Legaspi took time in going to Cebu as needed.

After a year the construction of the new house started, which is situated inside the Redemptorists’ compound at Nivel Hills, Lahug. In September 1993 Fr. Ramon Fruto, C.Ss.R., officiated the rites and blessings of the Ground Breaking.

While the house was under construction Sr. Alice Marie and Sr. Mildred stayed in the Living Gospel Community (LGC), they could not afford the high rental rates of the house in Doña Rita.

Little by little the new house had come into completion by construction in different phases at time reconsidering the budget, the solicited donations from funding agencies, benefactors and other generous people and the hard work of the Sisters.

June 19, 1994, as the first phase of the house was finished, the Sisters transferred to the new house from the LGC. Fr. Abdon Josol, C.Ss.R. blessed the new building in the presence of several Redemptorists and friends of the sisters, including the LGC Sisters.

At July 20, 1995, the first profession took place in Cebu: Sr. Juliet Canete took her temporary Profession in a Mass with Rev. Fr. Allan O’Brien as main celebrant.

1996 after finishing the second phase of construction, Rev, Fr. Juan Lasso de la Vega, C.Ss.R., General superior of the Redemptorists, who was attending a meeting of Redemptorist superiors, blessed the chapel and the library.

July 14, 1997 was the date of a double celebration: His eminence, Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, Archbishop of Cebu blessed the whole house, and Sr.

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Guia Marie Zardival, O.Ss.R., took her solemn Profession, the first one, taken in Cebu.

June12, 2004 the Redemptoristine Nuns of Legaspi decided to establish the house of formation in Cebu as a new monastery. Then eight Sisters went to Cebu:

Sr. Alice Marie, Sr. Juliet, Sr. Marlene, Sr. Luz, Sr. Maria Elenita, Sr. Concesa, Sr. Lolita, Sr. Therese. Eight Sisters remained in Legaspi: Sr. Mary Rahael, Sr. Emelita, Sr. Fides, Sr. Ellen, Sr. Magdalen, Sr. Ging and Sr. Celeste.

Now at last the new monastery of Mother Maria Celeste in Cebu-City, Philipines was estableished.

The Legaspi community elected a Prioress and the Councillors for the new monastery in Cebu. Prioress: Sr. Alice Maria Agosto, Vicar Sr. Concesa Guazon, Councillor Sr. Marlene Nicolas. This first Council served from 2004 to 2006.

March 8, 2006 the Monastery of Mother Maria Celeste became an autonomous monastery, independent from the Redemptoristines in Legaspi. Bishop Julito Cordes, D.D., was the main celebrant at the celebration, Fr. Joe Tobin, C.Ss.R., then General Superior of the Congregation was the homilist.

The number of the Auxiliaries of Cebu grew. Redemptoristines from

other monasteries and Redemptorists visited the Nuns in Cebu. Sr. Joan Calver came to give them a retreat. 2009 Fr. Joe Tobin visited the community once more. 2010 Sr. Rose Marie from Liguori came for her last visit, also the Srs. Joan and Janice Marie from this community visited them.

In 2010 a Thai Sister, Sr. Duangjai Udomdej (Sr. M. Alphonsus) O.Ss.R., transferred from Liguori to Cebu, where she took in 2012 her solemn Profession, together with Sr. Lisa Marie Dupit. In 2014 Sr. M. Alphonsus decided to come to help in the new founded community in Thailand and applied in 2015 to her official transfer to this community.

The visitors and celebrations come to no end: in 2013 Fr. General Mike Brehl, C.Ss.R., came to Cebu, 2014 the Asia-Oceania Redemptorist Formators followed, the newly elected Provincial of the Redemptorists Cebu, Fr. Nico Perez, C.Ss.R., and at June 2, 2015 the Redemptorist Frs. Tom Tanino and Ramon Fruto joined the sisters at the celebration of the foundation day.

Today (July 2015) eight Solemly professed Sisters, one Junior and two

novices live in the Monastery of Mother Maria Celeste, Cebu-City, Philippines.

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Appendix Has a mystic who lived more than two hundred and fifty years ago

anything to say to the youth of today? Magdalena Chojnowska, O.Ss.R. novice, Bielsko-Biała The year 2016, a much desired year, a year of great joy, is one that will

always enter into the history of our convent. The cause, naturally, is the beatification of our foundress, the Venerable Maria Celeste Crostarosa: a nun, a great mystic, and also called the greatest Italian mystic of the XVIII century. Maria Celeste lived in the Kingdom of Naples in the years 1696 – 1755, and on the 14th September of this year, 261 years will have passed since her death.

I very much believe that God is continually speaking to His Church, and

also through the elevation of M. Celeste to the honours of the altar, He is sending us a concrete message, which is His reply to the journey of our own epoch and the condition of mankind today. The essence of mysticism is not found in supernatural experiences but in what God, when He shows Himself, wants to communicate.

Here a question arises: if a mystic who lived more than two hundred and fifty years ago has something to say to a young lady of today who enters into life in the epoch of the smart-phone, tablet and internet? My own personal experience shows that she does, indeed say a lot. We are living in times when the media in general, by offering simple, rapid and practically unlimited access to the world of information and science, penetrate our daily lives. The pace of our lives is increasing, and at the same time, there is progress in the relativisation of moral attitudes and the rejection of absolute values. These and other factors are the reason why the media, everywhere present in our daily lives, is having a larger and larger influence over the attitudes of the young. By assuming the role of authority, it is trying to replace parents, who are the first and the most important persons who explain reality and form the young people in a mature relationship with God. The gradual disappearance of authentic authority prevents young people from accepting the ontological truth of the existence of God as an absolute Being and, in consequence, of entering into a relationship with Him.

During my personal journey of faith, beginning from when I became open to a relationship with God in the discernment of my vocation, I experienced very clearly that my own ignorance was not about to separate

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me from the truth about myself. And the truth is that in our human nature there is Love with a capital A, because our Creator is the Love who has create us all in His own image. Nothing is capable of destroying in us the most profound desire for a loving relationship between the Creator and the creature. And so, more and more, the young people who have not heard or accepted the Good News about God’s love, seek to satisfy this fundamental need by means of substitutes for love, which will never give them satisfaction, but rather, bring them at times to an entanglement in grave situations.

Every epoch has its own mystics. Ours too. Some, perhaps, have become known, but I think that the greater number of them, representing the different vocations in the Church, are living the hidden life. As I see it, the first thing that their presence in every epoch says to a young lady who has a problem of faith, or to me, when I need to go on increasing my faith, is: “There are”, “I love you”, “I seek you”. At this point there comes to my mind a comparison which I once heard – the experience of a mystic is like the story told by a friend who has returned from a distant journey, and from places where I have never been. When I hear her story, I am going to know about the existence, for example, of the Great Wall of China, and I have no reason not to believe in its existence, even though I have never touched I with my own hands. For me the life of mystics is an irrefutable testimony, that God wants to make Himself known to everyone. And so everyone of us goes seeking, so that we may meet Him and love Him. Our own foundress, giving a description in her autobiography about her first supernatural experience of God, which she had when she was 5-6 years old, tells us that God attracted her so much to love Him, that she wanted nothing else other than to love Him and serve Him. I also experienced the same when I got to know about the life of Maria Celeste. Thanks to her witnessing, the same desires started growing in me until the point when they became the only meaning for my life. Her experience of God has taught me to always recognize Him in everything – in the beauty of nature, in every person and event, and in everything I am learning to listen to what God is telling me. Regardless of the fact that we are separated by more than two hundred and fifty years, her relationship with God fascinates me and inspires me to great desires.

The great desires. There are some things, which we, the children of the modern world, can

learn from the mystics, especially from those who, with open minds and greatness of spirit stand out in their epoch. At first glance, it can seem paradoxical that a Neapolitan woman of the XVIII century, who moreover lived in a place and time when women had little to say in society and in the Church, can teach me something in a matter of great desires. To illustrate the

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situation of women in those times, I give the following example. In the epoch when M. Celeste lived, women were not taught about writing, and therefore they could not maintain contact at a distance. However, the young Giulia (this was M. Celeste’s baptismal name) learned to write by herself so as to be able to contact her spiritual director. We modern people live in a world which clips our wings. It reduces us to consumers of goods and services. Every day young people are taught how to organize their lives to have a sense of psychological “comfort” and material security. And we submit to this influence quite readily, because we have lost the capacity of independent reflection and do not know how to analyse the surrounding reality and draw our own conclusions. We have a fear of discomfort and a sense of loss. They are the ropes that bind us to the earth, so then how can we soar in flight if ropes hold us down? Another mystic of the XVI century, St. John of the Cross, wrote in his work Ascent of Mount Carmel: “It matters little that a bird is bound by a slender or great thread; for even if it is a slender one, it will be just as bound as if it was by a great one”. Maria Celeste belonged to a well-off family, well-known and respected in Naples. When she was young she had everything which permitted her to live a comfortable and pleasant life. And yet her great desires meant more than such a life, and so she accepted the proposition of entering a Carmelite monastery, and afterwards replied to the request of the Lord to found a new Order. In the end this cost her rejection by the world, and the loss of the comfort of being understood and accepted, but did not take away from her the certainty that she was following the right path, nor peace of conscience.

Responsibility for her own conscience and the dignity of the

person. They are the values that constitute the main feature of the life of Maria

Celeste, and they are another reason that inspires my admiration for her personality, and I take the lessons in these values directly from her. The origin of the independence of our foundress was her union with God, which was then the fruit of her internal spiritual journey. As a young girl she managed to form her conscience thanks to her spiritual direction – from her parents, priests and her direct direction from Jesus Himself, which can be seen in her spiritual experiences, which brought her, amongst other things, into the world of contemplation. Consequently, as a mature woman directed by the Holy Spirit, she herself took responsibility for her own conscience. Not only was this in itself a very rare phenomenon in those times, what was more was that she was a woman. And indeed, Maria Celeste persisted in the choice of her own conscience until this became the reason for her defamation and rejection from her contemporary world. She, however, did not stop, because she knew Who her Lord was, and Whom she served. And we should take

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note, that in regard to spiritual direction, the principle of personal responsibility for one’s own conscience was adopted in the Church only at the Vatican II Council. In contrast, in the times of our foundress, the dominant principle was that of absolute obedience to one’s spiritual director.

Is it not the responsible treatment of the question of conscience that Maria Celeste teaches the young ladies of today? Young ladies, who find great difficulty in forming a mature and healthy conscience for themselves, because they are often left on their own to make choices for which they are not prepared – are ever more often deprived of a true formation of moral maturity in their families. Growing up in a world which places examples of human immorality on a pedestal and relentlessly encourages people to “bend”, young people often to not know how to defend and conduct themselves in a different way from what, as it seems to them, “everyone else” does. On this point I am reminded of the example of two Polish martyrs in Peru: Michał Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzałkowski, beatified in December last year. These two Franciscans, at the age of scarcely 31 and 33 maintained fidelity to conscience – not at the cost of an inconvenience, but at the cost of their young lives. And this is what their witness teaches me – that if I understand that the true origin of my dignity is in God, nothing and no one will be able to deprive me of it. Only I can do so. Maria Celeste knew how to find her dignity in God and live it in an extraordinary manner. Here the spirit of Maria Celeste reaches out from her own epoch and finds our own times, reinforcing our own dignity, which is so often burdened by trivial desires and compromises with the world.

This year, which is a very special and happy one for our Order, I wish for

myself as well as for all the young people of whatever age, that, thanks to the intercession and witnesses of the saints of the Church that go beyond every epoch and every place, they may discover how to cut all “the threads” that bind them to the earth and take their flight towards heaven.

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Witnesses

My vocation, Lodovica d’Amato, O.Ss.R. novice, Scala

From the wonderful Naval Academy of Livorno, to the passageways of the Hospitals, to the simplicity of the Monastery of the Redemptoristine Nuns of Scala.

They can seem like places which are very different and in no way connected, but in reality they are the way for someone who aspires to the beauty of the world, then seeks it in suffering humanity, and finally finds it in the Love of Christ, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

This is not just anyone’s story, but my own, as it happened in these last four years. My journey began with a leap of my heart, a profound joy experienced for the first time at World Youth Day in Madrid amongst thousands of young people, and yet made clear to me in the most hidden silence of my soul. From it came a thirst to know, a search for a profound meaning for existence, and the discovery of being unique and loved in my simplicity. Then the slogan: “Let him alone fly who dares to do so”, and this was the spark which brought me here, to Scala, to meet this wonderful Community of the Living Memorial of Christ the Redeemer.

Prayer, meditation on the Word, Celebration of the Eucharist, Adoration, contemplation and the fraternal charity of the Redemptoristine Sisters, and once again the climate of silence and recollection, gave me an answer to the need of my heart to be, for God and for my brothers and sisters, a witness and gift of a boundless Love, which Christ Himself has poured out to me.

When I communicated the news to my friends that I would be entering the Monastery of the Most Holy Redeemer on 25th March, for the most part they congratulated me, telling me I was a special girl. No, I am simply Lodovica, and what is unique, special and amazing is that God has thought about each one of us right to eternity and for each one of us He has “drawn up” plans for our Happiness. All I have done is to make a free choice to respond to this gift of God, and joyfully affirm my “Yes” to Life. Certainly, the way has been a long one, at times an exhausting one, but an encounter with Christ disrupts everything, and then, when you are free from every fear, you embrace Love. And it was in the contemplative life, particularly, that I

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discovered the beauty of the Essential and the power of prayer, as a gift and mission for the entire world. May my joy and my prayers reach you from the Monastery, particularly those of you who are young like me … to have the courage to swim against the current, and believe in a world that is more just and without violence, where you can affirm your uniqueness and your thoughts, and above all, not be afraid to put yourself in play for Love, because to set sail on the ship of the Beloved is the source of infinite liberty and happiness.

Izabela Stokłosa, O.Ss.R. novice, Bielsko Biała

My name is Izabela, I am 27 years old. After a three months ‘live-in’ experience in the enclosure at the end of 2013, I entered the monastery in Bielsko-Biała, on February 14, 2014. As a child I had great dreams and desires and very soon I came to the conclusion that my greatest wish was to become a saint. I do not know how this desire can become a reality in my life, but I ask God to help me to take the right path ... At the same time I continue to discover that God wants me to be holy and this is my vocation. For this reason He created me and every person.

I have always experienced the immense love of God that attracted me

so strongly which I could not resist, despite numerous opportunities offered to me by the world. I have graduated from a university, I have traveled, I have been deeply involved in the work of evangelization, as an animator and a moderator in the academic pastoral community “The Water of Life”. In the meantime I conducted a radio broadcast, which was a fulfilment of my hopes and dreams and also some journalism. Since childhood I have loved music, having studied the piano in particular. I was also interested in the German language and theater, but also these now belong to the past. I was fascinated with history, but soon after beginning my studies at the university I found that history was not for me and I changed my faculty.

This was also a crucial time for my vocation discernment. God entered

into my heart calling me to offer myself to Him totally in religious life. I did not know where and how to do it, but I was sure that God was calling me to this kind of life. Encouraged to continue my studies, I began to study theology so as to grow in a closer union with God. These studies helped me to know God more deeply and at the same time to understand that God was inscrutable. The acquisition of knowledge was accompanied by the experience of the charismatic community, mentioned above. Besides working in evangelization I was also learning to pray and to live in

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community, thus deepening my spiritual life. I experienced a spiritual paternity in the person of the priest who was pastor of the community. This was a key experience in my encounter with God - the Father, because I grew up without a father.

Only God could fill that void, using also this person. In 2011, my spiritual father brought me to Bielsko-Biała, to take part in the jubilee of two sisters - Urszula and Sylwia – and then it all started!

I met the tender gaze of Jesus there, who expressed great love and concern along with deep understanding of my being and of who I was. Moreover the homily of the late Fr. Jan Mikrut C.Ss.R., who spoke about vocation using simple words, awoke in me again the desire to dedicate myself to God. During the Eucharist, after Holy Communion, my eyes were full of tears - normally this does not happen, especially in public. This expressed my immense longing and the desire to live this kind of life, which was confirmed by the two sisters on that day, after 25 years of religious life. I also heard Fr. Jan say (he saw me for the first time): “Look, a Redemptoristine is arriving!”. This surprised me a bit, but I was pleased and confirmed. At that time I felt I was at a crossroads, because I had just broken up with my boyfriend. He was my friend and tried to persuade me that my vocation was to become his wife, not a religious. That relationship was for me a kind of a trial like that of Abraham…. “Izaak” was my vocation. Then I received three clear insights: I could not love Jesus except with an undivided heart, devoted only to Him in a spousal relationship that aims at total union with Him; that vocation was not just mine but a gift belonging to God; that God did not call me to Carmel. This made me free and open to once again to accept the gift of God, that destined me for Redemptoristine life.

I am very grateful to God and happy that He chose me to be part of the Redemptorist Family. The longer I am here, the more I believe that this is my home and destiny. I discovered that our charism has always been in my heart and has always been part of me. I feel that this is a good family, I love my sisters and I want to live here for Jesus, for the Church, for the Monastery and for all. With peace and joy in my heart I look forward to the day of my vows to Jesus, my Spouse who fill me with a great desire for love and for holiness that inflames my heart. Glory be to God!

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