Community and Pauline Mission: Places of Awakening, Proposal and Vocational Growth

“To look at you, Vocation Animators, is to renew our hope!”
With these words, Sr. Elide Pulite, fsp, began her session on Community and Pauline Mission: Places of awakening, proposal and vocational growth.
Sr. Elide put forward to the participants some particular questions:
What is the vision of the Pauline community of America of the youth today? Do they know who are the youth for whom they pray, suffer and offer themselves? Do these communities view the youth as ‘possible vocations’?

The meeting of the young with the community sisters should be a moment of synergy, where one feels the force of communication and dialogue, the beauty of the meeting, of the inter-communication and of the exhcange that brings about communion in the Spirit.
It is in this moment that convergence is conceived and gives rise to the syntony between the community and mission.
It is an experience of communion with God and with the sisters that arouses the desire to consign life to God and to the people, in community.

The mission demands a special pedagogy so as to be ‘revealed’ gradually to the young people.
The reflection on the essential elements of the mission should lead us to communicate it to them with enthusiasm, in simple and accessible language, before demonstrating the complexity of the technical means used in the apostolic activity.
The mission as ‘place of proposal and vocational growth’ does not refer only to those moments in which we bring the young people to places of our apostolic activity, it could be something sufficiently reduced.
It is important to enhance the communication of our pauline vocational experience with the narration of meaningful apostolic experiences and the history of the lives of Pauline sisters , priests and brothers who have left witnesses and examples of apostolic holiness; to share important words and motivations of Fr. Alberione and Thecla Merlo in relation to people, to nations; to speak of the force of the Word of God and of the Eucharist for the Pauline mission, on the characteristics of prayer and of Spirituality.

The community and the Pauline mission become places of vocational proposal when the sisters live the essential elements of the pauline vocation. It is not sufficient to organize a beautiful visit, to decorate the house, have some communitarian and apostolic activities, if the vocational life and the mission do not really passionately ‘move’ each member of the commuity and pierce them with boldness, faith, joy and love in the adventure of the following of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life.