This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the canonisation of Saint Benedict Menni, founder of our congregation. In 1999, those who attended this historic moment in Rome, as Sister María Rosa Abad of the Province of Spain recalls. In her words, that celebration was a mixture of emotions in which a feeling of ‘joy and satisfaction’ predominated when they heard ‘finally, Benito Menni is a saint’.
However, Sister María Rosa stresses that, beyond the act of canonisation, that day brought together a hospital community that felt united on a global level. ‘We realised that the roots of the mission of hospitality were spread all over the world,’ she says. That celebration made visible a ‘large, open, plural, international hospitaller community’, and left an indelible mark on those who participated.
For Sister Maria Rosa, the legacy of hospitality left to us by St. Benedict Menni remains as relevant today as it was in his time, urging us to act with compassion and service in a world with new and urgent needs. Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan, he explains that ‘when we walk the path of hospitality, we see, we stop, we approach, we welcome and we care’. She adds that this commitment calls us to ‘maintain this vision of being in those places where our presence is most needed’.
On the occasion of this anniversary, Sister María Rosa sends a message of hope to the entire Hospitaller community: ‘Let us walk in hope and let us always walk with that attitude of wanting to find and discover those aspects of life that today as a congregation we have to continue to respond from our being and doing hospitality’.
🎥 We invite you to watch the video and listen to a fragment of the testimony of Sister María Rosa Abad, reliving with her the emotion of that historic celebration.