The spirituality of our religious family has its foundation on a sentence taken from Saint Paul : “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me “ (Gal. 2:20)
The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (professed by the women and men religious) and the commitments (especially those related to unity and charity) are a continuous Paschal experience of death and resurrection : they are an experience of faith through which Jesus Christ ( unisce tutti a lui o unisce chi li professa?O entambe le cose? Ho risolto traducendo “Cristo, fonte di unità”) , the source of unity, identifies each member to him through the action of the Holy Spirit.
“Holiness consists in a void which we discover in ourselves and we accept it : God fills this void with Himself to the extent that /insofar as we open our heart to His fullness (Eloi Leclerc, “Knowledge of a Poor”).
The spiritual life that the members of the religious Family live in unity comes from the awareness of their “nothingness” and of the superabundance of grace : the consciousness of the free and transforming love of the Father is every day clearer and clearer. The Father is free to act in the hearts that are open to Him and are emptied out : He can transform these eager hearts into His son’s heart through the action of the Holy Spirit. In this way, the Holy Trinity can abide there.
Among the virtues that make up the spirituality of the religious family , humility is the first : through humility , we can read our heart, we can see God and God only, we can forget ourselves – even our sin. Humility is truth.
God does not work in the depth of a soul as if he was an isolated being. He operates in the whole Church and in her cells. This is the reason why the Daughters and Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (FFCIM) don’t look for personal holiness, but for the holiness of the whole religious Family. Insofar as they melt in “one”, through unity and dying to themselves, they give shape to the religious Family, a cell of the Body of Christ.
The motto “Propter Gloriam patris!” doesn’t focus on the commitment of all members to do every single action so that the Father can get the glory. It’s the other way round : the Father has manifested Himself and His boundless love in His Son through the Spirit and the Daughters and Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary ( FFCIM) are called to let this event of salvation be crystal-clear in their lives (Rom 3:18)
They are eager to let God be evident in their lives and, hence , they don’t try to “act” in order to be saved , since they’ve already been saved thanks to God’s boundless love: they are gathered in unity as a religious family and, thus, they try to be the “reflection of God” , the reflection of this gratuitous Life operating in the world.