The XXII Extraordinary General Chapter ended on October 23 in Ciempozuelos, where we always meet with our charismatic roots.
For a month, 40 sisters from different countries have met and shared life and work with the desire to discover and dream of a better horizon for our life. They were studying and approving the new Constitutions, which reflect our identity and way of organising ourselves. But, above all, the Constitutions, as the document states, “are for us a vital point of reference which helps us to live our consecration in fidelity,” as Oblates.
The Chapter has been a journey of interiorisation and active and generative listening, carried out in three areas: personal work, at tables and in plenary, with a methodology of “conversation in the Spirit”, which has helped us to interiorise, to share from the heart and to reach consensus.
We began this reflection as a whole Congregation, together with the laity, in 2017, and it has been a participatory process up to this point. We have contributed from the different realities, feeling in communion, to build together the final text of the Constitutions. The next step, once the final draft has been completed, is to submit it to the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (DIVCSVA) for final approval because we are part of a Church that entrusts us with the “liberating mission of witnessing, by our life and service, to the redemptive love of humanity, especially of women in the context of prostitution”, as stated in our Constitutions.
We return to our communities with the illusion and responsibility of sharing all that we have experienced with the sisters and with the whole Oblate Family. And with the desire to make real the message that Lourdes Perramon, Superior General, transmitted to us at the closing of the Chapter, to make “of the new text of the Constitutions, that ideal that we want to reach, the flight to undertake once again, landing it, living with authenticity, with generosity and meaning, all that we have approved and embodied”.
(hermanasoblatas.org)
