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FAMILLE MARIANISTE

MARIANIST FAMILY

                            FAMILIA MARIANISTA

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No. 19

Christmas Message 1999 from the

World Council of the Marianist Family

MERRY CHRISTMAS

 

This year our message has special significance since this is the Christmas leading up to the Great Jubilee 2000.

With the entire Church we will give thanks to the Father, who by the power of the Holy Spirit, in order to save us and lead us to Himself, sent us His firstborn Son who became man, born of the Virgin Mary.

In addition, this year will have particular repercussions for us Marianists since, as Family, we will commemorate and celebrate several important events in our history:

The 200th anniversary of the return of our Founders to their country after their exile.
The 200 years of the Sodality of Bordeaux, the first model of Marianist Lay Communities.
The 150th anniversary of Fr. Chaminade's death.
His imminent beatification which we expect will take place during the New Year.

All of us Marianists, at the threshhold of this Jubilee Year on Christmas night, marked by the opening of the Holy Door, contemplate Mary for whom the Almighty worked marvels, offering us Her son, the Savior of the world.

And like Her, recalling the presence and deeds of God in our past and present history, we give thanks to God for His great love manifested to us from generation to generation.

With Her, as with the people of Israel, as we commemorate these things, let us give new vitality to our personal and corporate identity as members of the Marianist Family.

The beatification of Fr. Chaminade, our Father in Faith, urges us to do it through a creative fidelity to the gift of the charism which he received and transmitted to us, and which today remains alive and incarnated in us

 

HAPPY JUBILEE YEAR

 

And wishing you the best for the New Year, so that this may truly be a Jubilee Year, let us offer to our Family, to the Church and to the entire world a meaningful and prophetic gesture, which can easily and immediately be captured in all cultures.

With the theme which the Pope has offered us this year, the Trinity, and keeping in mind what we ourselves need and what is urgent for our world, the sign which we Marianists can offer to others during this Jubilee Year is COMMUNION.

Communion in a triple dimension: A personal one which has to be cultivated in contemplation of our Trinitarian God, modeled by Jesus in his prayer "that they may be ONE in Us, with Us, and like Us." Another, of relationship among persons with a same vocation, in our case our Marianist vocation. We maintain a reciprocity which helps us all in our own self-realization and which creates unity. A third would be a missionary communion, the same as for the disciples of Fr. Chaminade, the Missionary Apostolic.

This COMMUNION, cultivated and promoted amongst ourselves, within the four Branches and in all the Marianist Family, can be also our best way of saying THANKS for the beatification of Fr. Chaminade.

And in communion and committed to the work of creating communion, let us look at our world as a vast missionary field opened to us in the Third Millennium.

December, 1999

Maria Blanca Jamar, F.M.I

For the World Council

 

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