While Our Lord has blessed me with many wonderful experiences, in nearly twenty countries around the globe – almost ten years in youth ministry and over five years as a practising lawyer – my novitiate year in Somasca, Italy was undoubtedly the most beautiful year of my entire life to date.
That year concluded recently on January 25, 2014 with my public profession of the evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity and obedience within the Order of the Clerics Regular of Somasca, known colloquially as the Somascan Fathers.
A novitiate year is a unique, challenging and grace-filled ‘twelve month prep’ for any discerning child of God willing to respond to Christ’s call to follow Him more closely by being consecrated to religious life.
It is a call to joyfully imitate Christ’s life; a life that was poor, chaste and obedient. A life of perfect charity.
Picturesque Somasca, a town located within the south-east mountains of Lake Como, in Northern Italy, where the “Mother House” of the Somascan Fathers and final resting place of our founder, St Jerome Emiliani is situated, was the ideal and peaceful setting for this important formative journey towards the vocation that Our Lord had always designed for me.
I entered novitiate overwhelmed by the role that a consecrated religious has in the world: a visible sign of the lived evangelical counsels to, as Our Holy Father Francis put it, “wake up the world” that everyone needs to respond to Christ’s invitation to be perfect as Our Heavenly Father is perfect.
Thankfully, I found consolation in the inspirational example of our founder, St Jerome Emiliani, who as a converted layperson, gave away his wealth as a 16th Century Venetian military nobleman and laid down his life for the love of the most fragile and abandoned in society, namely, those dying of the incurable plague, orphaned children, women that he converted out of prostitution and the poor dying of famine.
St Jerome Emiliani established hospitals and homes throughout Northern Italy for these cases of grave need, founding a company of followers to assist him, known as the company of the servers of the poor.
He personally tended to both the physical care and spiritual development of those Our Lord placed in his path – catechising his fellow labourers in the working fields as well as the poor within the hospitals and homes established to fulfil his intention of reforming the Christian people to the life that was characteristic during the time of the apostles.
500 years later, the Somascans continue the charism of St Jerome Emiliani in demonstrating the Paternal Love of God through caring for the most abandoned and needy in society and forming them into mature, responsible Christians.
Together with extended periods of prayer, formation on consecrated religious life and Somascan spirituality, my vocation to follow Christ through the example of St Jerome Emiliani was affirmed again and again during my novitiate year.
I was graced to experience our current apostolic missions caring for: orphaned children and teenagers within four communities in Somasca, AIDS sufferers in our community in Como; women who were victims of domestic violence; women needing care and support to see through their pregnancies; women converted from prostitution (many of whom were victims of sex trafficking); persons with drug and alcohol addictions; and the education and daily care of gypsy ‘Rom’ children, all within our Somascan communities in Milan.
I continue to ask Our Lord for the strength and grace to faithfully live my professed vows as I now bring all these experiences received from prayer, formation and apostolate during my novitiate year to my first mission as a Somascan religious here in Australia before commencing theological studies in Rome this October.