Round Table on Mother Rosetta Marchese

Rome (Italy). October 20, 2022 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Servant of God Mother Rosetta Marchese (1922-1984), Superior General of the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, sixth Successor of Saint Mary Domenica Mazzarello.

To remember her, a Round Table was organized that “can constitute a further opportunity to give thanks for the history of holiness aroused by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Institute and to deepen the charism as it was actualized and witnessed by Mother Rosetta.” (Circ. 1021)

Inserted in the context of the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute, the anniversary recalls that the lives of the Saints of the Congregation are new sprouts of life and paradigms of the future for the FMA and for the youth that they educate and accompany with the style of the Preventive System. They are a fragment of Kairos, they contain a special charismatic grace, fruit of the Holy Spirit and a sign of the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

Mother Rosetta, with her passion for God and for education, encourages us to revive the commitment to take care of and to walk together with the new generations, to believe in change, for the presence of God in history as an interpretative key of reality and educational processes (Cf. Acts of the General Chapter XXIV).

 “Education is a thing of the heart and only God has the key”, says Don Bosco. Mother Marchese, inspired by the Holy Spirit, has the art of imbuing the human with divine experience, of accompanying those entrusted to her with great interiority and motherhood on the path of holiness. God in history, God in others, God in Himself, and herself in God. This is the interpretative code of her existence, always lived spiritually in the offering of “Cum Ipso, per Ipsum, In Ipso” – With Christ, for Christ, and in Christ until she receives the Eucharistic-Marian grace of the Eucharistic indwelling, of the permanent presence of the Body of Christ in her after Communion.

In the correspondence of her letters to her spiritual father, the Servant of God Monsignor Francesco Fasola, she tries to describe the ineffable mystery of the presence of Christ in her, identifying it now as the open sore of Christ’s side, then as the torn heart of Christ from whom flows that redeeming blood in which to immerse everyone who passed her – sister, youth, lay, priest. It also manifests itself as a continuous Pentecost in which the Lord uses her poor lips to communicate in the Church and, especially among the sisters and priests, the gift of the Holy Spirit.

It is proper to mystics to perceive the divine mysteries in each other. She wrote on 31 January 1980, to her Spiritual Father, in a letter with a great missionary and Marian inspiration, “Help me, Father! This mysterious gift fills me with sweetness, with immense gratitude, but also with trembling. I need so much to be helped to live it in adoration, in the deepest interior recollection, in prayer, and in the most total service, with the immense desire that Jesus sanctify every soul that touches me, as He sanctified John in the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth.”

In the Round Table that will take place on 20 October in the Generalate of the FMA Institute, broadcast in live streaming, there will be the opportunity for a ‘deeper encounter’ with Mother Rosetta, to know how the gift of God to the Institute has been actualized in her person and being able to drink, as in Cana, “the new wine of the charism that nourishes vocational fruitfulness, strengthens the joy and amazement of the call to be missionary communities, ‘Mornese outgoing’, communities that proclaim Jesus with their life” (Acts of the General Chapter XXIV) because filled to the brim by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Whoever wishes to share a testimony or grace received can write to animazionesantitafma@cgfma.org

Program:

Invitation

Link to live streaming

Interventions