Aid to the Church in Need: Columbia: Assisting the important work of the Visitation sisters

Columbia: Assisting the important work of the Visitation sisters

Posted by Project description on 6/7/2009, 5:41 pm
Board Administrator

Visitation Sisters – ACN helps sustain their pastoral and charitable work

Colombia's capital has a problem, in that it has doubled in population since the late 1970s – like other major Latin American cities also. Today around 7 million people live in Bogotá, many of them in slums on the fringes of the city – like Bosa in the southwestern quarter, for example.
Here too is the Monasterio de la Visitación de Bosa, the convent of the Visitation Sisters. It is home to some 38 enclosed nuns, who follow the Rule of St Francis of Sales in a life of prayer and contemplation. St Francis, then Bishop of Geneva, founded this order in Switzerland, together with the French noblewoman St Jane Frances de Chantal, at the beginning of the 17th century. It has been present in Colombia too for over a century.
"We are the only convent in the south of the city, where people live in conditions of extreme deprivation", emphasises Sister Rosa de Maria, the Superior of the convent, in a letter to the international Catholic pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN). She continues, "The poor are the treasure of the Church. Currently around 120 destitute and homeless families come to us, and we help them with food, clothing, medicines and essential toiletries".
But the sisters do more than merely provide material help; for they give spiritual support too, as Sister Rosa explains: "We are active in teaching the Faith and giving instruction for Baptism and Confirmation, and we also open up the convent so that the local faithful can attend Holy Mass".
However, she does not conceal the fact that the sisters themselves have to struggle for their own survival. For years, she tells us, they have been striving to modernise the convent, while at the same time remaining faithful to the Rule of the Order, which states that the community must provide for its own support as well as that of those who come to them for help.
And so the community seeks to support itself, partly by the time honoured means of baking hosts, sewing altar cloths and vestments for use in the Liturgy, and partly also – and indeed mainly – by rearing and selling laying hens, eggs and young chicks.

At the monastery "Monasterio de la Visitacion" in Bosa, sisters at work in the stable of the laying hens

At present the convent has two separate units, containing 3,500 adult birds and 1,500 young chicks. They are now hoping to add a third unit of a similar capacity. However, the necessary investment – in buildings, technical equipment and poultry – are well beyond their modest financial means. And so they have turned to ACN for support. It is an investment that will help secure the future of the convent – and consequently also the long-term pastoral and charitable initiatives of the Visitation Sisters in the Bosa quarter of the city, one of the poorest and most densely populated areas of Bogota.
For the diocese of Soacha, to which this area of the city belongs, the commitment of these enclosed nuns is of inestimable value – a shining witness to a living Christian faith in an environment otherwise marked by destitution and violence.

To help this cause please contact the Australian office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148. Web: www.aidtochurch.org

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Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148 ABN: 62 418 911 594
Ph/Fax (02) 9679-1929 e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org web: www.aidtochurch.org