Homily: Requiem Mass of M. Annunziata Stanizzi PDDM
Fr. Michael Goonan, ssp

            The most important reason why we have gathered here today is to pray for the eternal repose of the soul of Mother Annunziata Stanizzi PDDM.

Certainly we come to remember her and to celebrate her life, and to express our support and sympathy to her religious sisters and to comfort one another, but most especially we come to pray for the eternal repose of her soul. That is certainly what Mother Annunziata would want from us.

I had the great privilege of being her spiritual director and her confessor in the last years of her life and I can say that Mother had no sense of herself as being a great saint, or someone who was already perfect.  Rather, she was very much aware of her failings. To her dying day the sacramental confession of her sins every two weeks was very important for her.

Mother carried with her to the end of her life what I would call ‘the burden or the cost of leadership’. For many, many years she was the Superior of the Sister Disciples in Australia and New Zealand, local superior and novice mistress. An important aspect of a leader’s role is to make decisions, decisions that often affect the lives of others. And while she made every decision with the best of intentions, she had the burden of knowing that some decisions were at a cost to others, and that she made some mistakes – some she was aware of and some she was not.

Far from wanting us simply to praise her today, Mother’s request before her death was the same as a great saint and another mother, St Monica, who said to her son Augustine: ‘Take no care of this body of mine; all I ask is that, wherever you may be, you will remember me at the altar of God’.

And so, Mother, we do remember you at the altar of God today, and we pray for the eternal repose of your soul.

Of course we pray this prayer with great confidence, believing in the goodness, love and mercy of our God, and knowing, having experienced, the goodness and love of Mother Annuziata, a love without end as St Paul notes in the second reading of today’s Mass. In the Gospel Jesus assures us that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood will live forever. Mother took part in the Eucharist on almost every day of her religious life, at times defying medical advice to be in the Chapel. This faithful Sister Disciple had a great love for the Eucharist. We can be very confident that there was much rejoicing in heaven early last Wednesday morning when the Divine Master said to Mother, ‘welcome good and faithful servant, enter the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world’.

            We also gather today to express our sympathy and our support for the Sister Disciples of the Divine Master who have lost a person they can truly describe as their mother in religious life. I have to say the Sisters have been magnificent in their care of Mother during her latter years. They were blessed to have her, and she was certainly blessed to have them.

I believe personally that we are surrounded by the angels and saints but we simply do not see them. In her final years Mother was moving, in a sense, between heaven and earth, and I think the veil became thinner for her. There were moments when she felt intensely the presence and love of the Divine Master, and the presence of the angels and saints.

She was quite sure her guardian angel was watching over her, and I have no doubt either. When I visited her in her hospital room during her final illness, and also her earlier illnesses, her guardian angel was present, but so many other guardian angels were there as well, in the form of her sisters who maintained a 24 hour vigil with her.

There will be a big adjustment for the sisters now that Mother has passed to her eternal homeland, and we promise to be brothers and sisters to you all in this time of adjustment.

           Many of us thought that Mother would pass away on one of the feasts of the angels, either the Archangels on 29 September or the Guardian Angels on 2 October. But instead she chose, and perhaps there is some choice, to depart on 1 October, the feast of St Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, a woman religious like Mother. On reflection, there are definite similarities, as well as obvious differences, between the two. Interestingly they were almost contemporaries. Therese died at the age of 24, just eighteen years before mother was born. Had Therese lived into mid-life, she and Mother would have lived at the same time.

Though receiving little formal education St Therese is today a doctor of the Church. ‘My vocation is love’, she wrote, a love that is expressed not in great and spectacular acts but in the simple small events and happenings of everyday life. Mother likewise never went to university, but she had a knowledge of God and of human beings – a wisdom – that grew from many years of prayer and reflection and practical charity.

Therese had a great love for the missions but could not go because of ill-health. Mother, who was blessed with a strong constitution, did become a missionary and traveled to the other side of the world from her native Italy in the service of the Divine Master.

In her later years, as old age and diminishing health took their toll, Mother adopted very much the position of Therese and offered her prayers and sufferings for others – for her sisters, for the Pauline family, for priests, for vocations, for the souls in purgatory, for the suffering. She would recite three or four rosaries a day for different intentions. She had no doubt that her prayers and sufferings were helping someone. When she recovered from some very severe illnesses in recent years she would simply say, ‘the Lord has some more work for me: he wants me to help some more people’.

It was that sense of mission that drove her on. In one sense, she couldn’t die until she felt confident that she had completed the task the Lord had given her to do on this earth.

A day before she died I told her that her work was now done; she could go to heaven if she wished. Even then she gave me a look that suggested she wasn’t totally convinced, but, once she was back home in the convent, she was ready to accept the invitation of the Divine Master and yielded up her spirit.

She died on the feast of St Therese, and her funeral today is on the feast of the Holy Rosary, which is very fitting because she loved the Rosary. Perhaps a better way to express it is to say that she was a woman of the Gospels for the rosary is first and foremost a meditation on the events of the life of Christ. She traversed the sorrowful mysteries a great deal in recent years, participating in the cross of Christ through suffering and ill health. We rejoice that she has now passed from death to resurrection, from the sorrowful mysteries to the glorious mysteries, from earth to heaven where, no doubt, she continues to intercede for us all. 

May she rest in peace. Amen.