There are moments in history when time reveals deep links between past and present. The year 2025 was for us like one of these dense moments of memory, a year in which three threads were woven into a single fabric of grace: the Ordinary Jubilee of Hope, the opening of the 90th anniversary of our Congregation on December 8, and the centenary of the visit of Mother Igilda, our foundress, to Rome during the Jubilee of 1925. Three events that open as doors to interior territories, invitations to pause in the places where God’s call took shape in the lives of our foundresses.
The “Pilgrimage to the Heart of the Origins” was born as a contemplative response to this interweaving of memories. Ten stages that retraced the significant moments of our foundation, an itinerary that each community in the world lived according to its own possibilities, adapting it to local contexts, to the different geographies of our missions. In Rome, in particular, we walked on the same roads that Mother Igilda walked in 1925, when her vocational journey was taking shape in a time of search and discernment. Those roads, a century later, have become for us places of memory, spaces of dialogue with our origins not as with a distant past, but as with a spring that continues to gush.
To walk this itinerary is to recognize that the first steps taken with hope and missionary ardor in 1936 continue to resonate in our lives, in our daily choices, in our fidelity to the peripheries of the world where we are called. Walking together has also included those who, because of age or illness, have only been able to walk this pilgrimage within the walls of their own rooms: this too is pilgrimage, the inner movement toward the center, toward that core of belonging that constitutes us as a missionary family.
As we conclude this Jubilee Year, we carry with us the resonances of this shared journey. The pilgrimage to the heart of the origins has taught us once again that walking together is much more than moving through space: it is entering a spiritual horizon where past, present and future dialogue, where memory becomes prophecy, where hope is a transformative force that pushes us toward new missionary frontiers faithful to the ardor that animated the first steps of our foundresses.
Sr. Emanuela Nardin, community General Direction
