Dear Friends!
Our hearts are filled with gratitude, joy, and hope as we enter the year 2023, our jubilee year marking the 100th anniversary of foundation of the Society of the Sisters of Social Service.
With deep gratitude for the past 100 years: We are here and alive. It was the work of Divine Providence that our Society has survived wars, revolutions, dictatorships, persecution, suppression, separation, crises… In spite of all these things, or I would rather say with all these things we are here and alive. The storms of history did not prevail against us, nor did our own weaknesses and failures.
With great joy: because God has blessed our sincere efforts. Our being here speaks about God’s faithfulness and providence; it proclaims God’s steadfast love that holds us and keeps us, that wants us and affirms us.
And with hope: because God wants us to be here, God needs and wants this charism of ours; God has a dream for us, has plans with us, and our deepest desire is to give ourselves fully so that God’s dreams and plans about us can be fulfilled.
It is a custom in our Society to have a motto each year, which then becomes the leading idea of the year to which we return frequently to reflect on it, to deepen it, to tune our lives to it. When searching for a motto for our jubilee year we were lead in our prayer to our Blessed Sr. Sara Salkaházy’s motto: Ecce ego, mitte me! [Here I am, send me!] and we applied it to the Society:
Ecce adsumus, mitte nos, Alleluia!
Here we are, send us, Alleluia! It is not accidental that we reached back to Sr. Sara’s motto; her life testifies that the SSS way of life is a way to holiness, that the SSS charism is integral to the universal church and as such can provide saints if we truly and faithfully live it. Sr. Sara became “Blessed” through her continual and total transformation in love and through her total self-gift in the service to others, and in the very concrete self-offering for the life of the Society and its members. There is no other way for a Society wishing to walk in the mission of God’s Sanctifying Love, than the one shown by Sr. Sara.
Faithfully searching for the Divine Will and ready to continue our mission we stand before God on this threshold of our 100th anniversary not as individuals but as a community, as the entire Society. We are not saying separately one by one “Here I am, send me,” but with one voice and heart we all say it together: “Here we are, send us!” This explains why the plural form was chosen for the motto.
We chose to say this new motto in Latin, in the language of the church; this is also meant to express our unity and to symbolize that our charism was given to the universal church. We stand united, Sisters of Social Service from all over the world and with one heart and voice we say:
Ecce adsumus, mitte nos, Alleluia!
Wanting to remain faithful to our charism, to our mission inspired by social encyclicals, we turn our attention to the social encyclical that gives an accurate analysis of our present reality. As we start reading through Fratelli tutti, we immediately begin to feel at home, because almost each page brings back to us thoughts from our foundress in an actualized form.
In the first part of the encyclical entitled “Dark Clouds over a Closed World” Pope Francis gives an accurate analysis of the grim reality of our world, summarizing the “dark clouds” of the destructive social phenomena. It seems as if the world were in regression, as if the graces of the two millennia of Christianity were evaporating from people’s lives, as if we had learned no lessons from the destruction caused by recent wars, as if all efforts to build unity were turned inside out. At the root of all problems we find the individualism of closed hearts, the disregard for and the violation of human dignity, “powerful interests behind trends that tend to level our world.” About one hundred years ago Sr. Margaret captured this phenomenon in the following way: “The cause of social problems is a lack of spirit. We want to work for the return of the Spirit. We can bring about social reforms only if society becomes filled with the Holy Spirit when the cause of societal misery – the lack of spirit – is ended.”[1] We can ease social problems only if we make space for God’s Holy Spirit in ourselves, in our relationships, in our systems, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our cultures. It is the Spirit of Love who can expand our hearts, who can open us to the relationship with the other/Other, who can change our closed world by creating in us “a heart open to the whole world” and thus bringing about an “open world” enlivened by God’s Love. The social encyclical of our times invites us to work for a “civilization of love” by practicing social love, which “makes us love the common good’, makes us effectively seek the good of all people, considered not only as individuals or private persons, but also in the social dimension that unites them.” This is the way in which we can advance toward the “civilization of love to which all of us can feel called. Charity, with its impulse to universality, is capable of building a new world…[because] social love is a force capable of inspiring new ways of approaching the problems of today’s world, of profoundly renewing structures, social organizations and legal systems from within.”[2] This fully resonates with what Sr. Margaret taught to the Sisters in 1947: “Lasting outward structures cannot be created without internal rebirth. With a true inner rebirth – that is not the fruit of violence but an internal renewal – a world is being created that possesses inner energy, and this is from the Holy Spirit. It is only with the grace of the Holy Spirit that a new world can be created.”[3]
So here we stand on the threshold of year 2023, one hundred years after God’s Holy Spirit had called us into life; here we stand under the dark clouds of a closed world but open to the God of Love, who wants to make all things new; and embracing in our hearts this charism of ours that calls us to be social and enlivened by the Spirit, we turn our ears to the voice calling us: “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Who is going to join my Son in this labor of love so that the civilization of love gets rooted among the people? Is there any other answer imaginable than calling out loud:
Ecce adsumus, mitte nos, Alleluia!
Blessed Sister Sara, teach us to embrace this mission ever more fully, and intercede for us!
[1] Margaret Slachta: Blessing of Our Banner. 1933.
[2] Fratelli tutti 182. 183.
[3] Margaret Slachta: Motto 1947: A Christ-Life World through the Holy Spirit.
