English 
When the call becomes an answer, and the answer becomes a mission
On September 7, 2025, in the parish of Saint Robert Bellarmine in Rome, six young women said their first “yes” among the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate (PIME). But even before it was a celebration, it was a response to a call that each recognized in the silence of her own heart, in the unexpected folds of daily life. Emma Kiap and Francisca Sagu are from Papua New Guinea, Sumaja Penumaka, Krupa Thomas and Bernadette Kamei from India, Akhi Rozario from Bangladesh, six voices joined in a song that crosses continents, cultures, different languages.
The path to that “yes” was not a downhill one. They all speak of the most difficult challenge: that of knowing oneself. It is the universal challenge of every consecrated life, perhaps of every authentic life: to cross the inner desert, to make peace with one’s own shadows, to love even the parts of oneself that are most difficult to accept, and then to find oneself in the joy of a life given to God, certain that He guides, sustains, and loves each one.
And then there was the exodus: leaving one’s homeland, one’s mother tongue, the habits that provide security. But in that fragility a new horizon opened up. Living with sisters from other cultures became for all a school of universal love.
During the homily of the celebration, Father Luca Bolelli, PIME, spoke words that touched the hearts of these young missionaries, “Before you, it was Jesus who said yes.” This is the truth that overturns all perspectives. Their “yes” is not the heroic gesture of those who decide to sacrifice themselves, but the response of love to the One who loved first. “We are not the center of this celebration,” the newly professed remember, quoting Luke 14:25, “the center is someone else.”
The most intense moment of the liturgy was for many the handing over of the cross. Those words – “Receive this cross on which hangs the One who is to be from now on your model and the sole object of your love” – became mission and promise together.
Six “yeses” said in a chapel on Sept. 7. Six different stories that converge in a single truth: that life finds its fullest meaning in giving, that the greatest joy comes when one stops being the center and makes room for Someone Else. Six young women who discovered, quoting Fr. Clemente Vismara of PIME, that: “Life is beautiful if it is given with joy.”
In a world that often looks at religious life asking “why waste one’s life?”, they testify that it is not waste but gain. Not escape from the world but deeper immersion in humanity, there where God’s love waits to be recognized, proclaimed, lived – in geographical peripheries as in existential ones, in the kitchen of a convent as in the most remote villages.
Their first profession is not a point of arrival, but a new beginning. An “here I am” pronounced with Mary, a “if God wills it will be done” said with Mother Dones, always having Jesus, the Father’s Apostle, Sower and Seed, before them. The mission continues, every day, in living “today with all its realities, wherever we are,” letting their lives and fraternity, speak of God’s universal love.
