Pie Discepole del Divin Maestro

Sr. M. Lucia Filosa Province of Italy, 15th of June 2012 Licentiate in Religious Sciences (MSc) at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas - Angelicum, with a thesis topic: Interpersonal relationships in religious communities.

The theme of relationships in religious communities is certainly not an original argument, nor an easy task: on the issue so much has been written and many things said, along with the typical risks associated with situations of abundance. Yet the subject is alive: in general or provincial chapters it continues to be the matter to be discussed; in meetings of superiors general as formators, we continue to discuss this reality which is both simple and mysterious, which is so easy and yet difficult: interpersonal relations. We would like to understand more and more how to become more like sisters that live and grow together, despite the daily effort to communicate and create. Photo gallery

The post-synodal exhortation, Consecrated Life of John Paul II, in 1996, sees the consecrated life as a sign of communion of the Church and dedicated to the analysis of the central religious fraternity.

It is not possible to analyze the issues related to living together in the name of the crucified and risen Lord, without having first defined the nature and purpose of a project of consecration, and this is because the community is not an end in itself, but depends on the attainment of the objectives themselves of the consecrated life, those ends that theological reflection, enlightened by the Spirit, stresses significantly. The argument of religious community, also, is the classic interdisciplinary issue that requires a discussion of two combined and complementary points of view: that typically theological as well as psychpedogical. Failure to comply with this interdisciplinarity always has harmful effects, because it shifts attention unilaterally and prevents synthesis of the two sides, unbalancing the speech or on the axis of spiritual-ideal or upon that of the pyschological-earthly.

With this work I wanted to prove that the recovery at different levels of relational dimension could constitute a new element of renewal of the Church in general and in particular the consecrated life, especially and above all because the relation enables the mass of circulating gift of all and one: sharing. A community, in fact, becomes a fraternity when the relationship is passed over and becomes sharing. I also tried to see how relationship can become a place of formation and offer the real possibility of growth of the person, self-knowledge and openness to the richness of others and their many provocations. If our communities do not raise any more surprise and no longer pose any question to greet those who approach them and attend them, perhaps it is due to the fact that the quality of life does not reveal anything particularly extraordinary and does not reveal a Presence and Love that unifies all and changes all. Do we desire that our communities of consecrated life be a prophecy of a new humanity? We begin to live a fraternity so real and so intense as to leave reveals a greater love, from which all draw forth from and in which all converge!