Twenty years ago, in the suburbs of Rome, 24 year old Rachele Paiusco founded the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo, now present on three different continents. Since that first “yes,” there are now almost forty sisters belonging to the female institute, a “yes” that is bearing unimaginable fruit through the splendor of the happiness that these young women show for their vocation.
The house is the main place of community life, where, amidst silence, prayer, and activities of all kinds, their friendship has opened up to the most diverse forms of hospitality, becoming a familiar place for many and a shining light in the context in which it finds itself at every latitude.
Nairobi
Kenya was the Missionary Sisters’ first mission abroad, inaugurated in 2012, in a context that is still strongly tribal. As soon as you arrive, you are struck by how different Africa is from anything you have ever experienced before, first of all because of the poverty of the dirt roads and tin shacks, but you cannot help but immediately notice a different kind of human openness. In fact, you are greeted by a flood of enthusiastic and smiling children, children of everyone and no one, who shout “Wazungu!” (white people!), while they assault the new arrivals with hugs and handshakes, as if they were seeing old friends again. Children are everywhere, with a fertility rate more than three times that of Italy and no tablets or smartphones to keep them indoors.
In the parish of St. Joseph in Kahawa Sukari, with its 50,000 inhabitants, the Sisters’ activity is incessant, punctuated only by the regular rhythms of silence and prayer between teaching in schools and keeping company at the hospital entrusted to the Fraternity.
Since that first “yes,” there are now almost forty sisters belonging to the institute.
But there is one initiative in particular that represents an absolute novelty for the Kenyan world, the Ujiachilie (“Let it be done”). This initiative involves more than fifty mothers with disabled children in a program for themselves and their children that includes free physical therapy at St. Joseph Hospital and community gatherings on Tuesdays with singing, dancing, and porridge. The Missionary Sisters accompany these women, who are often very poor and many of whom are Protestant, offering them a time of music and catechism, while their children are entertained for a few hours by young volunteers. Here we meet: Max, who is deaf and mute and does not know sign language; Kalvin, who has cerebral palsy; Faith, a girl of perhaps four years old who is only now beginning to walk and talk after suffering from tuberculosis; and Kamao, who has Down syndrome and has been a one-man show for years thanks to his interpersonal and dance skills. Ujiachilie is a true miracle, because, in Kenya, a disabled child is a disgrace to the family and tribe, often costing the mother her husband or her home. Here, however, these women find open arms, to the point that many of them tie their children (perhaps 8-year-olds with spasticity) to their backs and walk for an hour and a half through the destroyed streets of the suburbs. It is the reality of “sharing needs to share the meaning of life,” which even without any education or history, these mothers intuitively understand, seeing how they and their children, who were once considered a source of shame, are now viewed and treated.
Denver
Close to the Rocky Mountains, in affluent Broomfield on the outskirts of Denver, stands the American mission where the sisters have joined the priests of the Fraternity. Ironically nicknamed “The Truman Show,” Broomfield appears to be the perfect town: clean streets, not a blade of grass out of place in the beautiful American homes, where every neighbor is always ready with a smile, accompanied by an even nicer “Good Morning!” Yet, behind this impeccable image, there is often devastating loneliness.
This is the story of Fred, whom I met during hospital visits: a terminally ill man who made the irrevocable decision to end his life through euthanasia (legal and widely accepted, if not promoted, in Colorado). Without insistence, but simply by dedicating time to him and accompanying him in his pain, Fred, after months of struggle, constantly postponed the final act until he surrendered, moved by the evidence of gratuitous love: “But I don’t deserve this care.” An episode similar to that of the poor man welcomed by Mother Teresa on his deathbed who felt he was “dying like a prince.” The same Mother Teresa who remembered how “loneliness and the feeling of not being loved is the most terrible form of poverty.”
This is why the house in Denver is such a precious place in the American struggle, where the intuition of a greater good even leads families to leave their states and move thousands of kilometers to live in this “new” community, where they can enroll their children in the school where the Missionary Sisters work and share the life of the parish with them and the priests of the Fraternity.
Grenoble
In the setting of the Dauphiné Alps stands the youngest of the mission houses established in the last 20 years. But of that bygone France, “the favorite daughter of the Church,” often only the bell towers remain as witnesses to a distant history.
The Missionaries present, welcomed with great openness and availability by the previous bishop Guy de Kerimel, have as their first occupation the companionship of the faithful and education through teaching at the ITEC Duchesne High School, adjacent to the house. Although it is formally a Catholic institute, many of the students are not only non-believers but also unbaptized. But it is precisely with these children, university students, and young adults that what Peguy wrote is coming true: “God’s grace is stubborn: if it finds the front door closed, it enters through the window.”
Welcoming others has become a constant maternal theme in these missionary years.
God, in fact, finds other ways when people reject him, and in France there are many who, rediscovering the faith, ask for baptism, even where every door of the heart seemed closed. In such a secular environment, just the habit alone is often an opportunity to “continuously reopen the scenario of God to the world,” as Fr. Massimo Camisasca once said, because the curiosity with which the Missionaries are viewed often becomes a source of new relationships.
Welcoming others has become a constant maternal theme in these missionary years.
Thus, the door of the house has also opened to children, middle school students, and friends, organized in groups that all use the expression “chez les soeurs” (at the sisters’), so that everyone knows that the Sisters’ house is also their home. This is how the Church, through them, is meeting people of all kinds and backgrounds (believers, atheists, traditionalist Catholics, agnostics…), who are setting out on a journey together.
Magliana
In what was the first real home of the Missionaries, until they moved to Via Aurelia Antica in 2017, there is now the mission in Magliana Vecchia, a complex neighborhood, known more for the news stories of the 1970s than for its vitality today. Daily life takes place between creative workshops, visits to the sick and elderly in the neighborhood, and, after Sunday Mass, the eagerly awaited community breakfast in the living room with many parishioners of the Madonna del Rosario. Marian devotion is the heartfelt center of popular worship, which has recently reestablished forgotten traditions, such as the Pilgrim Madonna in the homes of the neighborhood and the procession through its streets.
“Knock on my door, my mother will open it… God is waiting for you in the garden, and he wants to talk to you. You can sit close by and listen,” recites Chieffo’s song, which best describes what the house represents today.
In fact, since 2021, the Magliana has become a place of hospitality for young women who, for a variety of reasons and with very different backgrounds, spend a few months here on a personal journey. They are offered the opportunity to stay with the Missionary Sisters for a minimum of three months and a maximum of two years, so that they have ample time to work on themselves, giving them tools for the journey that awaits them in the years to come. Hospitality has now become the constant maternal theme of these missionary years, the way in which young people and adults, families or friends, in every corner of the world, are shown the beauty and happiness of a “yes” that is constantly renewed and lived together.
