From July 12 to 14, members of our communities from Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina met at Saint Alphonsus Community (in Villa Allende) to share and train in the mission.
Under the motto “The Mission unites us, hope encourages us,” we seek to strengthen why and what for of the unity of the Regions of Buenos Aires, Resistencia, Chile, Paraguay, and the mission of Uruguay. We saw the challenge of sharing how we understand the Mission, transmitted with gestures and words, in our different cultural realities. In the words of the Provincial Superior, Fr. Javier Machado, this process of unification has as its objective the restructuring for the Mission, together with the call of the Church in which we are inserted and to which we cannot fail to respond.
The Redemptorist Mission implies a missionary dynamism that leads us to discover what God wants, moving us to new places, forms, and missionary situations. This presents new situations that challenge us. Among them, that of walking as a new Pedro Donders Province with our cultural differences. But, on the other hand, starting from the fact that we have all had the encounter with Jesus and we have been called to the same charism that makes us continue thinking and rethinking the Mission, giving a new meaning to our life and our vocation, as lay Nancy Mazucco told us: “the challenges have always existed and they only change in form.”
Likewise, in the image of the Samaritan well, we looked with Sister Marita, HMR at our realities and gave names to these new social and cultural challenges of today.
Sister Mariela, HMR, invited us to discover the testimony of fraternal love that the Mission demands of us, with Jesus as the model of encounter and action for these missionary challenges. We think of the Mission as a dialogue with reality, a process of change and a time of contemplation with the eyes of faith before what is presented to us.
We would like to thank all the participants and those who made this space possible.
Irma Ortiz
Pedro Donders Province
