As we begin this new year…

Thank you to Tony and Marcin for facilitating the session which marks the opening of the pastoral-academic year for our community of the Generalate. Thank you particularly for the rich presentations that challenge us all. We are privileged to live in a community that easily provides us with what we need in our various services. We often do not lack means. Last March, I toured the Sahel and met confreres who work in climatic and socio-political conditions that none of us ignore. Thinking of all those confreres would help us enormously to adjust our lifestyle.

I would like to take the opportunity as we begin this year to thank each and every one of you on behalf of the General Council for the various services you generously render to the Society. For five months, eighty percent of the General Council had been away from Rome and the Generalate hasn’t collapsed! A sincere thank you to each and every one.

At the beginning of this pastoral and academic year, it would be good for each one of us to remember our mission, to think of the reason why we are here, that is to say, of the different tasks each of us is called to accomplish and to commit ourselves to observe the discipline it takes in terms of respect for working hours and other aspects to accomplish them. In this sense, it also seems important to me that we learn to respect and to help each other in creating an atmosphere that helps everyone to accomplish the mission entrusted to them. In its message of 3 September 2020, to all the confreres, the General Council invited us to “live our missionary commitment with a greater sense of initiative, creativity and passion”. It is an invitation we must make our own and undertake our services with greater commitment and zeal.

This year there will be changes in the House: the Sisters of the Work will leave us at the end of the year after 55 years of service at the Generalate. We are grateful for their services rendered with love and joy. We will, in due time, say goodbye to them. To replace them, we have opted to do what many congregations do nowadays, to work with a catering service with which we will establish a contract. This will call for certain adjustments and for the collaboration of everyone.

The beginning of a new year is an opportunity to revisit our community project. Our community has one. It would be good that we take time to look at it again and above all that we commit ourselves more with the means that allow us to build a real community life. I believe that, for us, the building of a real community life is above all to be founded on common prayer and on other get-together moments.

I wish everyone a fruitful new pastoral and academic year. May God our Father grant us the necessary graces to live it in peace and joy with good health so that we may bear fruit and that our fruit last to advance the Reign of God in Africa, in the African world and in the whole world.

Stanley Lubungo, Superior General
Generalate, 26 September 2020