Welcome Address – SFIC 8th General Chapter -15 May 2013, Veghel, NL

A warm and pleasant welcome to you all – Sister Delegates from our four Provinces – PSP, PNP, Indonesian, and from our Host Province, the NL Province, and Sister Observer from our Kenya Mission;

To our Sisters and Brothers, who are generous and willing to assist us in this gathering – Gaby and Marianne, Fr. Theo, Bro. Bram, and Bro. Ids.

Welcome to Veghel, in this land of cheese and tulips, flowing with milk but also with refugees, both documented and undocumented. This speaks of the country’s generosity, which now has to define its limits.

Welcome to this 8th SFIC General Chapter with an average age of 64.6 yrs., 21.6 years older than the three youngest delegates, who are celebrating their 44th birthday later this year. Thanks to our Mission Superior of the Kenya Mission as observer to this Chapter, who pulled down the average age to 63.1 years.

We are gathered here as part of the global Franciscan household, a movement that began with the lives and treasured traditions of Francis and Clare, who, guided by the Holy Spirit, gave it permanent inspiration and direction. In Francis, the message of God’s love was burning so strongly that it could not be contained—it had to be proclaimed, not only by words, but primarily by a life that witnessed to the Gospel. It was a message rooted in the love of God, a flame that could not be extinguished in Francis’ time and in the generations that followed.

Teresia van Miert caught it and struggled to keep it, to hand it on to us as a legacy. The legacy lived on and became more colorful than our Foundress or her uncle, Pastor Bernardinus van Miert, ever expected it to be. Ter Liefde Gods spread and was caught not only by white but also by brown, black, and yellow hands and now we have brown hands in the land of the red hands (North America). We owe this to our Fire in the Beginning!

The responsibility of proclaiming effectively this message of God’s love and goodness in our times lies before us – it becomes a necessity now that we are declining in number and losing our credibility as a Church because of the numerous scandals among us that somehow we helped perpetuate with our silence and indifference. This reality becomes part of our agenda for our mission as a Congregation.

In my younger years, I saw a poster that read:“When the problem is long standing, try kneeling”. Through the years of experience, the word “kneeling” conveys a lot more meaning than just praying– it means striking one’s breast – atonement; rending one’s garment – stripping oneself of the layers of things one puts on that blur the image of Christ we vowed to follow but failed to radiate. In the same vein, a Tibetan monk once said: “A burning stick turned to the ground, has its flame drawn upwards.” This I think would best describe the beginning of a real Franciscan response to our mission today: a humility – that transcends borders, cultures (the purpose of our pre-Chapter process for the past three days), religions, species, and therefore will help us to survive and multiply as a Congregation!

With all these challenges and more significantly, the inspiration of our Franciscan legacy embodied in our theme Fire in the Beginning, I declare this 8th SFIC General Chapter in the year 2013 open!


Sr. Maria Lourdes Santos

General Superior