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Excerpts from the message of Pope Benedict XVI on the occasion of the Feast of the Presentation, February 2, 2007

“…The feast that we celebrate today reminds us that for your evangelical witnessing to be efficacious it must spring from a “yes” without reserve to the initiative of God to Whom you are consecrated by a special act of love. Like the aged Simeon and Anna who wished to see the Messiah before dying and who spoke of Him to all who awaited the redemption of Jerusalem, today, and especially among the young, there exists a great need to encounter God…

Those who have chosen God in the consecrated life…have only one expectation: that God reign in their desires, in their heart, in the world. In them burns a thirst for love that only the Eternal can quench. Through their example, they proclaim to our world, often confused but in reality always in search of meaning, that God is the Lord of life, that “his grace is worth more than life” (Ps 62:4). In choosing obedience, poverty and chastity for the Kingdom, they show that attachment and love for things and persons cannot satiate their hearts, that life is a more or less prolonged waiting for the encounter with the Divine Spouse, a waiting that must be lived with the heart always vigilant so as to be ready to recognize Him and to welcome Him when He comes…

Like the Divine Master, the consecrated persons must also be a sign of contradiction by their way of thinking and of living often in contrast with the logic of the world… One chooses Christ, or better still, one allows oneself to be unreservedly conquered by Him… Faced with such courage, many persons thirsting for truth are touched and drawn by those who do not hesitate to give their life for what they believe in…

Let us thank the Lord for so many religious men and women who throughout the world continue to witness of a supreme love and fidelity to God and to their brothers and sisters often to the point of martyrdom. Let us thank the Lord also for these examples that continue to elicit in the hearts of the young the desire to intimately and fully follow Christ always.

Dear brothers and sisters, never forget that the consecrated life is a gift of God and that it is He Who brings His projects to completion… We live in difficult times… Today’s feast shows us Christ, true Light of the world, who shines in the darkness of history and illumines each seeker of the truth.

Dear religious, burn of this flame and make it shine through your life, so that everywhere a fragment of the splendor of Christ, of the splendor of the truth may shine. Living for Him you witness to the fascinating truth of Christ and of the joy that springs from the love for Him. In contemplation and in action, in solitude and in fraternity, at the service of the poor and the little ones, in personal accompaniment and in the modern gathering spaces, be ready to proclaim that God is love and that it is sweet to love Him.”

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Sr. Nha Trang at her profession of First Vows

Sr. Katrin and Sr. Cristina Maria

Sr. Francis Joseph with

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