For us, Sisters of Charity, the icon chosen for the 110th Day of the Migrant and Refugee is highly evocative: in the illustration we glimpse the dramatic precariousness of the tents of a refugee camp and our charismatic memory returns to the experience of Mother Thouret who, in August 1795, is forced by the repercussions of the French Revolution to leave her native Franche-Comté: she joins her younger sister Jeanne Barbara, who had already left for exile in the previous months. Both find themselves among the mountains of French-speaking Switzerland, welcomed by Father Antoine Receveur’s Sodality of Christian Retreat.
Jeanne-Antide forced into exile
In the canton of Fribourg, many French Catholics, especially bishops, priests and ex-religious, had long established their abode. There are too many of them; the situation becomes unmanageable. In September, an expulsion decree is triggered for Father Receveur’s Sodality.
A long and exhausting wandering begins for its Solitaries and Solitary Sisters, which for Jeanne Antide will last 19 months: the caravan proceeds amid continuous and severe hardships: it crosses the Austrian border, enters Germany, finding temporary and precarious shelter, in the various cities crossed in the wake of the enormous cross. The members of the Sodality barely survive, repulsed by the local authorities, pressed by the French revolutionary armies and, in some cases, surrounded by the open hostility of the populations, who accuse them of spreading disease, unable to find the necessary care for the caravan’s many sick.
To Joan Barbara fell the fate of several other Loners and Solitaries: she died of fatigue and hardship in Neustadt. She was 24 years old. In that same atrocious winter, Father Receveur describes in dramatic tones the “agonizing” situation of his brothers and sisters: terrified by the possibility of being caught up with the French revolutionary armies whose advance into Bavaria is reported, unable to find enough to feed themselves, strongly advised by the authorities to give up their religious habit and disperse momentarily to escape the brutality of the Jacobin soldiers, they found themselves “faced with obstacles that seemed insurmountable, without asylum, without protection, above all without health, without work, pursued by the French armies and without the possibility of obtaining passports to continue further afield, exposed to a dispersion and an end that was nothing short of scandalous.”
In the spring of 1797, Jeanne Antida took from the group of Solitary refugees in Wiesent, and decided to return to Switzerland: on foot, alone, she faced two months as an exiled pilgrim, forced to move from one makeshift shelter to another, escaping from ill-intentioned men, misplacing her way several times, welcomed and refreshed by “good Samaritans,” listening to Mass in German in remote chapels along the Danube.
It was for her an experience of dispossession, of destabilizing precariousness, of disillusionment with her desire for community, of lively concern for her sick brethren and sisters, of profound union with Christ crucified, of daily and convinced reliance on God’s grace and his fatherly goodness.
God walks with his people
Many migrants – the pope reminds us in his Message for this Day 2024 – experience God as their traveling companion, guide and anchor of salvation. To Him they entrust themselves before leaving and to Him they resort in situations of need. In Him they seek consolation in times of discouragement. Thanks to Him, there are good Samaritans along the way. To Him, in prayer, they confide their hopes. How many bibles, gospels, prayer books and rosaries accompany migrants on their journeys across deserts, rivers and seas and the borders of every continent!
Our memory still goes to the prayer of surrender to God and trust in Providence that accompanied Jeanne Antide during those two years of forced exile. When she was now at the end of her strength and morally tried by the many dangers she faced, she had the gift of hearing within herself the voice of God: “Courage, my daughter! Remain faithful to me, I will not abandon you. Onward always! I will make my will known to you.”
The resource of charism for migrants and refugees
If all of us, men and women on this earth, are migrants on this earth, on our way to the promised land, all the more we Sisters of Charity feel strongly challenged by the plight of migrants and refugees, which in our hyper-modern age has reached new proportions and outlines entirely new problems of reception or rejection than in our past.
There are several Sisters of Charity around the world directly engaged in the service of reception, protection, social inclusion and pastoral care of refugees and asylum seekers. But every Sister of Charity is aware that the experience of itinerancy shaped our Foundress and that we, her daughters, are called to
- cultivate this inner dimension of surrender to God and trust in Providence,
- choose for a lifestyle, personal and communal, that is content with the “merely necessary.”
- make ourselves “good Samaritans” toward Christ who knocks at our door hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned, asking to be met, listened to, supported, accompanied toward the fullness of his humanity.
- To animate awareness of the phenomenon of forced migration, to counter prejudice, discrimination, generalizations, closures.
- Call to industriousness children, youth, adults, families, students…. Meeting, welcoming and accompanying refugees is not something to be entrusted to specialists. It is about promoting, together, as a community, the dignity of refugees and their rights and duties as citizens.
Sister Paola Arosio
Jesuit Refugee Service refugee and asylum seeker center coordinator
