Hope and Courage
Recently, Sister Martha de la Torre Juarez, one of our sisters from Mexico who has been in the United States since 2010, left to participate in an SMR mission in Rome, Italy. Martha has been invited to be a member of the community of sisters with whom the SMR novices will live and minister.
While Martha was in the United States, she was able to spend some years in studying and later ministered to immigrant men and women as a staff person of Strangers No Longer. It was with both regret and a blessing that those with and for whom she ministered as well as we, her sisters, sent her off to participate in a new ministry.
Our congregation has one novitiate which is in process of being moved from Kenya, Africa to Rome, Italy. There will be three sisters living with the novices, one from Mauritius, another from Uganda, and Martha. Currently there are two novices preparing to travel to Rome and another woman is about to begin her novitiate time in SMR.
The novitiate is a time of introduction and discernment to religious life and SMR. As the name implies, it is a time for a woman to begin living as a member of a specific congregation.
Based on the discernment of SMR and the novice herself, the woman makes a temporary commitment which can extended over a period of several years. In SMR currently, there are twenty-six sisters, in temporary commitment. These women are living and ministering is many different sections of our Congregation and continuing their formation with engagement in various expressions of ministry and study.
The list of countries in which these women are living is impressive: Peru, Panama, Guatemala, Spain, Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, and Madagascar. The foundress of SMR, Emilie d’ Oultremont d’Hooghvorst, felt a strong desire that the members of the congregation would live/minister in different countries of the world. From the first years of the congregation, Emilie sent women to various places. In one of Emilie’s letters, she wrote to us, as members of the Congregation, “we will go wherever the charity of Jesus Christ is pleased to call us…”. There is no question but to live that in the 1800s took hope and courage and it continues to do that in 2024.
We ask our readers to pray with us for all the women in our congregation and others around the globe who are discerning the different ways they feel that God is inviting them to live their lives.
Margaret Hoey