On the feast of Our Lady of Peace, Patricia Villarroel sscc and Alberto Toutin sscc, Superior General and Superior General of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, each delivered a conference exploring the meaning of religious consecration and the challenges facing the sscc mission today. They invited participants in the Poitiers Session, representing 14 nationalities, to rethink the heart of the SSCC vocation: consecration and mission.
Patricia Villarroel sscc, Superior General, gave the conference "Consecration to the Sacred Hearts: A Consecration for Mission." Drawing on the meaning of consecration in religious and Marian language, Villarroel recalled that the SSCC Constitutions affirm that the Consecration to the Sacred Hearts is "the foundation of our Institute," and stressed that the Congregation was born missionary from the barn at La Motte. To illustrate this, she traced the profile of Good Mother Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie as the Congregation's first missionary, and presented the figures of three lesser-known sisters: Cléonisse Cormier, founding missionary in Chile and Peru in the 19th century; María Josefina Lamarca, called the "Mother of the Congregation in Spain" for her role in founding communities in Torrelavega, Madrid, and El Escorial; and Grace Marie Tom, a Hawaiian religious sister of Chinese descent who served in Japan and India and was remembered as "the whisper of God."
Next, Alberto Toutin sscc, Superior General, developed the conference "The Challenges Facing Mission Today," taking the prophet Elijah as a symbol and companion for meditation. Fr Toutin placed Elijah's experience at Horeb — where God is revealed not in the mighty wind or the fire, but in "the whisper of a gentle breeze" — in dialogue with the founding experience of Good Father Pierre Coudrin in the barn at La Motte during the Terror. Drawing also on a reflection by Karl Rahner on the renewal of the Church and on the Magnificat as a Marian key for reading mission, the Superior General called on the religious to be "patient weavers of hope," in line with the exhortation of Pope Leo XIV. He closed his address with the story of Simon Wong-Sang-Ki, a young Chinese candidate from Hainan formed in Fuenterrabía, who died of tuberculosis in 1930 after consecrating himself to the Heart of Jesus and Mary.
Both conferences invite the Congregation to reread its missionary identity through the memory of its witnesses and through listening, today, to the signs of the times.
07/09/2026