2018: Year of the Rule of Life

Revisiting and revising the Rule of Life

“Expound to me the way of your statutes, Lord, and I will always respect them.
Explain to me how to respect your Law and how to observe it wholeheartedly”
(Psalm 119, 33-34)

Dear Confreres, Greetings in Our Lord Jesus Christ.
As we begin the New Year of 2018, dedicated to revisiting and revising the RL, we turn to each one of you to encourage you to enter into this process with a spirit that is free and open to God’s surprises. We believe that this process, inspired by the Holy Spirit through the Chapter event (“revisiting and revising the Rule of Life”, CA 2015, 49) is a time of grace that is being offered to us. All of us are asked to put our whole heart and our missionary passion into it, with a deep sense of belonging to our Comboni Institute. Among the many initiatives for the process of revisiting the Rule of Life, we shall have animation and reflection at Institute level, with the preparation of material that we shall share with the entire Institute through Familia Comboniana. The first “insert” in Familia will be prepared by the General Council and the remaining five “inserts” will come from various confreres in the continents or sub-continents. With our eyes fixed on Jesus, accompanied by our Founder and Father, St. Daniel Comboni, and while incarnated in the missionary situations in which we live and work, we feel it is our duty to mention three crucial points for this process that we are undertaking together.

First and foremost, we wish to say that, present in the foundation and the beginnings of our consecrated missionary life is the person of Jesus whose Heart hears the cry of the people, the cry of the poor and of all who thirst for justice and peace, and wants us all to be his missionary disciples.

Secondly, we wish to keep before us the living figure of our Founder Daniel Comboni. The increased understanding of his person in recent years, his canonisation and the relevance of his charism for the world, are one more invitation to keep him as our reference point, to know him better and to share his charism and his holiness with the people among whom we live and work.

Lastly, a further important aspect of this process is to be attentive to the signs of the Spirit present in the world, within the Church and the Institute. The situation in which we live the mission is the “theological locus”, the revelation of God for us today. We commit ourselves to being careful “not to let ourselves be deceived”, but to be vigilant so that, when the Lord comes, he may find us at our place like servants awaiting his coming.

May the Lord Jesus and our Founder assist us to live with confidence and joy this process that we are starting as brothers from many different cultures and races but all carved from the same rock, Comboni and his charism.
(The General Council)
Rome, 15 December 2017