The Feast of the Rehabilitation of Mother Clara Pfaender
Sometimes perhaps we ask ourselves if we know how to love, if what we feel and offer is true love. Love is built through growth in communion with God and with other people. It is the real beginning and end of everything. It is the very essence of life, and not loving is equivalent to not truly living. The life of each of us hides a profound inner meaning, a mysterious force that only love is capable of liberating and bringing to light.
Love is the only reality that can give immense joy, which offers meaning to life that a person can live in an attitude of abandonment and dedication. Do we know how to love? The answer to this question is found in the life and the example of Mother Clara, whose rehabilitation we celebrate on this memorable and grateful day.
Through her short life, Mother Clara opened herself and responded to the love of God and her fellow people. We know that the path of her life was not easy and did not run in a straight line, but God writes history often on and among crooked lines. On her path to freedom and faith, she left behind everything that seems to be most important to a person: homeland, family, daily bread and security, human honor and gratitude. She is the example of a woman who remains faithful to her calling up to the point of self-sacrifice. Nothing could bring her down, because her roots were anchored in God.
She discovered and felt the presence of God in every child she cared for, in every sister who was entrusted to her, in every prayer for the church and in every moment before the Blessed Sacrament, but also when she was misunderstood, abandoned and betrayed and certainly when she walked the streets of Rome seeking understanding and justice. After many trials, disappointment, poverty and even abandonment by the entire Congregation, Mother Clara chose the path of mercy and love. She remained in the love of God and lived in this love even onto death.
Mother Clara is not only our foundress. She is the one who began this wonderful journey of service, dedication and love that each of us continues today, living through who we are and what we do. God created us out of love and for love. We are valuable and important, and through baptism we became God’s children. We are called to become instruments of peace and to open our hearts in response to the love of God and our neighbors. The heart of every human being deeply longs for the fullness of truth and goodness, as we have seen in the life of Mother Clara, even when it seems that everything has been lost.
May her example and prayers continue to be the encouragement in our service and as light on the path to God, the source of all love. What Mother Clara wrote 165 years ago in the Founding Constitutions remains an invitation for each of us today:
Love is the queen, the rule, the soul and the life of the Congregation. It must unite the sisters closely, so that they may be one heart and one soul. It must shine on their faces, in their eyes, on their lips, in their words, in their behavior, in all places and things and bear fruit.
More than ever today, we are aware of this charism. According to Mother Clara’s words, love must remain the connecting element of our Congregation. So may God help us!
Written by: Sr. Mariana Muțiu FCJM and Sr. M. Magdalena Schmitz FCJM