The Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption “You Are You Plus Me” In the mid-fifties, Fr Giussani got to know the Little Sisters of the Assumption who were living in via Martinengo in Milan. From that encounter was born, in 1993, the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption by Gelsomina Angrisano For the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption The nature of the bond between the Congregation and the Movement is the history of a friendship that started by chance between the Little Sisters of the Assumption in via Martinengo in Milan and Fr Giussani. Then, since, like all true friendships, it was something made by God, it was forever and developed an extraordinary history. It was Fr Giussani himself who told us he had met a place and some people who had struck him for the simplicity and totality with which they were living the work begun by their founder, the Assumptionist priest, Fr Pernet. Many of us, his students, entered the Congregation. We saw a form of life made up of many new things: the people we were living with, the various circumstances, the proposal of a way to live the convent life, the vows, the missionary work, the judgment on the world, the internationality of the Congregation, the founders and their charism. In our immaturity, not only as regards age, but also as regards the historical circumstances of the time–the youth protests–we embraced all this, and everything unraveled like a love affair. Romano Guardini’s celebrated phrase, “In the experience of a great love, everything becomes an event in its ambit,” describes our experience perfectly. We always had the joyful certainty that the “great love” was Jesus who had become present in our life through the very human encounter with Fr Giussani. This was the “naïve boldness” that made us live everything positively, even our own evil. The separation There was one episode, amongst many, that helps understand how Fr Giussani shared our life. We were going through difficult times, since the circumstances were challenging us to make a decision on how to go ahead with our journey in the Congregation. Our differences with the Mother House were being formalized in the 1987 General Chapter, and things could not be left as before. One day, Fr Giussani called some of us to meet and told us he had met a high-ranking prelate of the Roman Curia. He had presented our question to him and told us that, to his surprise, this prelate had advised us to separate from the Congregation, adding, “You see, Fr Giussani, it’s a question of these people’s souls.” But Fr Giussani went on, “I kept this answer to myself for a while, then I realized that I don’t agree with his opinion, because he doesn’t know who Fr Pernet is, he doesn’t know what a noble tradition you have grown in, and he doesn’t know that you, you are you plus me. So we should wait for a sign.” The sign came with Msgr Errázuriz, now Bishop of Santiago, who was Secretary of the Congregation for Religious for a short time, but it was time enough for us, with his help, to understand how to present the problem and be ferried across to the other shore. In 1993 came the Papal Decree with which was born the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption. Passionate gratuitousness The episode I just related, apart from the insuperable ontological definition of friendship–“You are you plus me”–explains how Fr Giussani has always educated us: in great things and in small, the steps to take are the fruit of acknowledging something that happens and not the outcome of analyses made by our “wisdom” and which, therefore, can only bring division. Furthermore, it shows how Fr Giussani has always enjoyed seeing the work of another–in our case, the work of Fr Pernet–and the fact that we belonged to a history that was loveable and loved. “He doesn’t know what a noble tradition you have grown in.” The way Fr Giussani moved and moves when facing any intense human reality is that of a passionate gratuitousness in collaborating with it and helping it to become more and more itself. This way of his gave him particular qualitative and quantitative power for us, because we happened to find ourselves in a history of predilection. It is more and more clear to me that help in being “ourselves” has never come from insisting on the differences in our vocational form. Elementary aspects of Christianity “ Sure of a few great things.” For more than forty years, Fr Giussani has supported us on the elementary aspects of Christianity. After all, in the Assumptionist tradition there is this great phrase of Fr D’Alzon, who is a beacon of reference for the whole of his religious family: “Our idea is simply Catholic.” Fr Giussani has always spoken to us about event as covenant that establishes the new “I.” He has always spoken to us about the concept of convent, the concept of mission, the concept of charity, the concept of world. For whatever form of aggregative life in the Church, the central point of his pedagogy is education to live Baptism as the generative source of the new life that itself shapes all the factors of the “I” and all that we meet in reality. The original charism and, for that matter, every individual person, is incomparably exalted and given taste only in this immense riverbed. For the differences are genetic, made by the Holy Spirit, and they show themselves gradually, as in every living organism. It is not by chance that our direct participation in the more important formative moments of the Memores Domini arouses in us a growing understanding of our own tradition and helps us to take seriously the specific details of our own life, old and new, and that these are gradually more bound to the charism. It is the visible form of the vocation and it is Christ who gives it, safeguards it, and renews it. The novelty of our face, which happened in a precise riverbed, through the attention and enthusiasm for what God gradually brings about, went as far as shaping the canonical form: firstly, because we became a new Congregation of Pontifical Right and, secondly, because, alongside the representatives of the Fraternity of St Charles and of the Memores Domini, we are part of the diaconia of the Fraternity of CL, according to the statute approved by the Pontifical Council for the Laity. “ Monastery, convent, or house: facts, created, constituted, generated by those who are chosen as living stones. Chosen as stones to form, to generate an existence anyone can experience, which, through its very visible form, shows that only He is: Christe, cunctorum dominator alme” (Luigi Giussani, Il tempo e il tempio, Bur, p. 20 [Unpublished English translation The Time and the Temple]). The Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption was established in 1993 by Pontifical Decree, as an autonomous Institute, detached from the original nucleus of the Little Sisters of the Assumption. The main activities of the congregation are in the sphere of assistance to families, both in terms of health assistance at home and support in education and work. Currently, about one hundred sisters belong to the congregation. Their presence in Italy is spread throughout houses in Turin, Trieste, Rome, and Naples, and two houses in Milan, as well as a house founded recently in Cordoba, Spain.