Book Description

God is Love. To believe in this God of unconditional Love is a lived experience in each person and in each generation everywhere on the globe and all different cultures and historical periods. In the beginning of the nineteenth century we notice in the south of the Netherlands a strong movement to renew and to actualise the Catholic faith in the concrete circumstances of poverty and political neglect. In this way the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity Daughters of Mary and Joseph was founded on 7 July 1820 in ’s Hertogenbosch. Similar to several other congregations in the same period St Vincent de Paul was their principal source of inspiration, determined their charism and remained at the centre of their spirituality. Religious life is essentially a lived experience of faith in which concrete persons touched by the incomprehensible Love of God dedicate their life in total surrender to this Love. As a result, they obey to the divine calling to be wholly transformed in love and to become docile instruments of God’s overwhelming Charity towards all vulnerable persons - young and old – their brothers and sisters who are stripped of their human dignity, humiliated and enslaved in many subtle ways. In this Vincentian congregation this divine vocation of Charity was originally implemented as a specific service to the education of blind and deaf children but widened to the care of other forgotten groups like victims of trafficking in women and discrimination or subordination of women.