A reflection by the General Governments of the Consolata Missionaries
in preparation to the canonisation of Joseph Allamano
Dear Missionaries,
Dear Lay Missionaries of the Consolata,
The Family is our way of being, of living and working as Consolata Missionaries. It is an original value transmitted by our Founder to his first sons and daughters through his teaching and above all through his own life experience: "I want to apply my experience of community, of which I have lived all my life, to this institute".1
From the beginning, Allamano gave the Missionaries a Family, with a particular atmosphere, a spirit and a style of interpersonal relationships proper to a Family, being the Father himself. He loved each one so intensely as to leave them with an indelible memory from the first meeting2. Sister Benedetta Mattio tells:
I remember with great joy the day I was welcomed into the Institute by the Founder. We were received in his office with great tenderness... I can still see the moving scene of him in our midst. His attitude as a loving Father was very strong in him, I am happy to have had the good fortune to know him and feel from his own mouth and heart how he wanted us to be Consolata Missionaries3.
The Founder, with a Father's heart, valued and strengthened the family atmosphere, through personal encounters, interest in personal and family situations, attention to everyone. Sister Giuseppina Battaglia presents him as the true support: "Listen to me, who know that I love you and I always love you with true Fatherly love."4 Father Sandrone expresses how Allamano, as the Father of this Family, loved his children: "he was a father who tenderly loved us and taught us how we, his children, should love each other".5 Father Nazareno in his testimony reports: "He was truly a Father, our Father. We have never had another like him."6 Father Giovanni Chiomio says: "His words are simple, he speaks to his children whom he loves so much, and everything is marked by the greatest paternal goodness".7
Brother Benedetto Falda confirms:
On Sundays, after the services, he loved to have us around him, close to him, and familiarly, like children around the beloved Father, and he listened to each other without effort... and again we wanted to hold him back and stretching a little the joy in hearing his voice, so paternal and persuasive that it left us in our hearts a peace and a desire to put his teachings into practice."8
The father needed a family in which the bonds of love were strong and true; the words of the Father Founder are incisive: "if you want to be here you need this spirit: here is not a college, it is a family and I want to form you as I want".9 Allamano wanted people of charity, communities where interpersonal relationships of delicacy, attention, acceptance were lived: "When there is tenderness, charity reigns, when tenderness is lacking, charity is also lacking... Our Consolata is tender and wants her children to be tender too."10
The Father knew that when the bonds between people who love each other are stronger than death, beyond any personal interest, and beyond any dream of vain personal fulfilment, there is freedom of the spirit and true love that is gratuitousness. In a Conference to the Sisters he wrote: "Isn't a sister of religion more intimate than one of blood? Remember, that you must love each other very much. Love of God, but I would say more love of neighbour to love him practically to make one body. Be willing to die for each other."11
Father Founder had the certainty that the family spirit is the vital energy, the fire of true love, which animates his sons and daughters on the path of holiness: "holiness essentially consists in charity... charity is holiness: loving and becoming saints is the same thing... Charity towards God is necessary in a particular way for us who have received the vocation and mission to communicate it to the souls."12
For Allamano the family spirit is the sign of credibility, of proclamation, of the need for evangelization. For Allamano it is inadmissible to announce or evangelize as solitary missionaries where everyone carries out his own plans. He wanted to give his Missionaries a style of thinking, of action: "you are all brothers: you must live together and then work together for the rest of your life... if you do not do so now, how ready will you be on a mission to give your life for each other."13
For the Founder, the family spirit is seen as a principle of unity, it is not only to live but to work effectively in evangelization. This spirit of union, of unity of purpose, is present from the beginning and is revealed in the method followed. We see in Murang'a's Conferences:
"Everyone was able to communicate their ideas and the fruit of their experience: to agree on the work to be started, on the way to overcome difficulties, on the methods to be carried out in evangelization, so that we could proceed in the common work with unity of understanding and action."14
In an important letter dated October 2, 1910, he wrote:
Another characteristic of mission work is harmony. The union of mind and heart while making fatigue light, makes strength and obtains victory. Woe to the missionary who, tenacious in his judgment, does not know how to renounce his own sight in order to cordially accept those of the majority of his companions and even more those of the Superiors. He will work in vain and perhaps destroy the good done by others15.
All this is the gift and the challenge that Allamano left to the first Missionaries and to us today. What was needed was a true Family with a deep breath of human-spiritual love, with broad views and universal horizons. Starting from our intercultural, intergenerational communities, how can we live and bear witness to fraternity in a world profoundly marked by individualism, discord, mistrust, fear, withdrawal into oneself, etc.?
Evangelization requires the witness of communion, of welcoming communities where everyone feels at home, where it is possible to overcome distances of language, culture, ethnicity, ... our communities are called to live the unity of intent and to take up the cry of pain of the people of today to lead them back into the loving embrace of God.
May the Canonization of our Founder, a blessed time to be lived with intensity and gratitude, be an opportunity to renew ourselves, an invitation to rediscover the beauty of our Charism and live more as he wanted.
May the Founding Father bless us and the Consolata protect us!
1 Conferences to the Fathers, March 2, 1902.
2 Cf. The Founder and Formation, doc. I.M.C. n°4 p. 10.
3 T. AGOSTINO, Interview with Sr. Benedetta Mattio, Mozambique 2001.
4 G. ALLAMANO, Lettere., edited by C. Bona, op. cit. cit., Vol., X, no. 1754, 126.
5 SANDRONE, Testimony, 1939.
6 G. ALLAMANO, 23 December 1906 in AIMC, Fondo Allamano, ms.
7G. CHIOMIO, 16 February 1936.
8 G. PANELATTI, Commemorazione, Torino, 16 febbraio 1946, in AIMC, Fondo Allamano, commemorazioni.
9 By the students of the small IMC Seminary on 20.1.1918.
10 Conferences to the Fathers, April 11, 1920.
11 Conferences to the Sisters, February 15, 1920.
12 Vita Spirituale, pp. 248-249.
13 Vita Spirituale, p. 405.
14 LETTERS, Report of Giuseppe Allamano to Propaganda Fide, Turin 1 April 1905, Vol. IV, no. 427, 330.
15 G. ALLAMANO, Letter to the Missionaries of 2 October 1910, op. cit. cit., edited by I. Tubaldo, 135 § 2.). and p- 405.
