Though most people are thinking of this as “Super Bowl Sunday”, it is also this special Feast Day which comes 40 Days after Christmas. Several years ago, Pope John Paul II inaugurated World Day for Consecrated Life which is also celebrated today. It was good to celebrate Eucharist today with a full chapel of so many of our friends. Today is a good day to be grateful for our vocations but also to thank God for all those who support our life.
Tomorrow morning I will be flying to New Orleans. One of our earliest monasteries was founded in this city and the sisters have a large building so when the abbesses were planning their yearly meeting, they invited us to have it there. We planned it well before Mardi Gras! Though each monastery is autonomous, we have two Federations that our Poor Clare communities belong to. Our community is a member of Holy Name Federation which is mainly in the Northeast, Southeast but includes Montana. Our sister federation is the Mother Bentivoglio Federation and they are Midwestern and Northwest as well as two communities in Canada.
We support each other in many ways – one of these is to offer educational opportunities to the sisters. This week there will be an abbesses meeting Tuesday thru Thursday. We will have a speaker from the National Religious Retirement Office speak to us about resources they offer to communities. You may recognize NRRO as the organization that takes up a collection for the retired religious of the United States. We will have a few days to talk about our communities, what we have learned in our ministry as abbess, what resources have been helpful. Being with the sisters is always like going to a family reunion. I’ll let you know more about it when I return home! May God give us all safe travels.
So now I better get back to the super bowl and see who is winning!
Sr. Mary