A meeting of the members of the Ratio committee took place in Rome from the 23^rd to the 28 of November 2009.  Sisters came from different countries to attend the meeting: Sr. Gemma Pepera from the Philippines, Sr. Rosanne Sinclair from Australia, Sr. Maria Stachurska and Sr. Halina Dołęga from Poland, Sr. Maria Kruszewski, Sr. Geraldine Wodarczyk and Sr. Edyta Krawczak from the United States and Sr. Teresita Brońska from Rome, Italy.  Working in a multilingual environment required the services of a translator.  Sister Bożena Flak performed this task and Sister Jana Zawieja assisted her.  The goal of the meeting was to gather materials for the first part of the Ratio, which is to present Nazareth formation in the light of the charism of the Congregation.

On Sunday, 22 November, we journeyed in the footsteps of our Mother Foundress by participating in a Eucharistic celebration of the Mass in the Clementine Chapel, very near to the tomb of Saint Peter the Apostle in the lower crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica.  We followed the steps of our Mother Foundress out into the city of Rome to places that were important to her and therefore significant in the life of our Congregation.  We visited our Motherhouse on Via Machiavelli, where we had time for prayer and reflection as well as for meeting with our sisters there.  During our stay at Machiavelli, we really had a chance to breathe in a little of the atmosphere of the house where our blessed Foundress lived and died.  From there we visited Saint Mary Major Basilica and several Roman churches which were close to her heart.  Our guide for the day was Sr. Mercedes Maliszewski. 

Sister Janice Fulmer, Superior General, initiated the group’s work on Monday morning by sharing her observations about Nazareth formation and also reflected on the process of working on the Ratio. Sister Janice reflected on her recent journey to Israel and shared the words of Bishop Marcuzzo regarding our Congregation: “As Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, need to drink from the Source…” from the very life of the Holy Family of Nazareth.  Sister emphasized that we have not yet fully discovered the depth of the theology of the Holy Family so that it could penetrate our thinking and our life.  Sister Janice also expressed her conviction that we have to do all that is possible in order to deepen our Nazareth spirituality so that future generations of Nazareth Sisters would grow in the atmosphere of a deepened spirituality of our Congregation in different stages of their formation.  Our meeting with Sister Janice proved helpful in our work during the week.  Another inspiration for our work this week was Sister Teresita’s reflection on Formation rooted in Baptism.  During the subsequent days of our meeting we worked on different topics regarding the understanding of our formation from the perspective of our charism.

Although we worked primarily in language groups, at the end of the meeting we met as one group to share the fruit of our work in the smaller group. We also clarified our understanding of developed topics and agreed to continue work on the next topics of the Ratio until the end of March.