Religious life still has a place in today’s Church despite people drifting to lay movements:
Mother Superior
By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
Being committed Religious will guarantee that God will bless the Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate with long life and vocations despite difficult times, Superior General of the first ‘active’ women’s congregation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church told The Record.
Rome-based, Canadian-born Sr Janice Soluk, the Superior General of the Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate, said during a pastoral visit to Perth last month that living the original charism of the Order “as committed Religious” with faith in God is the only sure means of survival.
The Order was co-founded in Lviv in 1892 by Blessed Josephata Hordashevska with Basilian Fr Jeremiah Lomnitskyj and diocesan priest and widower Fr Kyrylo Seletskyj to minister to the spiritual, moral, intellectual and social needs of Ukrainians, while also witnessing to God’s love and care.
They especially focused on the needs of children of poor families whose parents had to work, and the congregation grew quickly.
Within 10 years there were 100 Sisters, and the first missionary Sisters were sent to Canada to follow the Ukrainian Catholic immigrants in 1902 as people were fleeing the poverty. In 1911, seven Sisters went to Brazil again following the Ukrainian immigrants.
When the Sisters first settled in the countries where the Ukrainians migrated to, there was very little infrastructure as those countries were in their infancy.
The Order started hospitals, day care centres and schools in Brazil and Canada, and again in the US when sent there in 1935 and to the former Yugoslavia in 1936. Today, while vocations are down, Brazil remains its largest province, with 300 of the 750 Sisters based there.
Since the fall of Communism in 1989, it has taken the corrosive elements of the West 20 years to pervade the Ukraine while it took 100 years to do in Canada and Brazil, Sr Janice said.
Sr Janice says the Order, like all Religious congregations, are up against a formidable secular culture resistant to consecrated life.
Regardless, the global Ukrainian community needs them as much as ever, she said. And it is essential they survive.
“We must keep reminding ourselves why are we here. The majority of parishioners today are elderly people, and though our first work was with youth, in our parishes there aren’t many,” she said.
While, as in the Roman Catholic Church, there has been an influx of youth seeking an authentic sense of Catholic culture, the lack of vocations since the fall of Communism impacts on their mission, as Sisters not of retirement age are rare and the young novices are not quite ready to lead.
Changes in demographics where they minister to has led to the closure of most of the schools they started, so the challenge is to find the children to minister to, according to their founding charism.
But hope remains. The faith is often strongest, she noted, where Christianity is being persecuted – like during Communism.
Today the persecution is there in a different form and the Spirit seems to be calling young Catholics to the ‘new movements’ rather than to consecrated life.
But Sr Janice believes there is still a place for her Sisters today.
“The Lord is in charge but it’s up to us,” she said.
“If we continue to live our charism and do what we’re supposed to do, we will continue to exist; if we go away from that and not be the committed Religious that we should be, then why would God want to call young women to this life? I believe that we have a future and we are, and will continue to, live our charism and our call to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and there really is a need for us. God will turn things around.”