Charism, Spirituality, and Mission

from our Rule of Life

The Institute of the Ursuline Sisters of Saint Jerome in Somasca is a religious Congregation, in which every sister, sustained by God’s grace and the maternal protection of Mary, commits to living the mission of educator apostle, with a mother’s heart, according to the charism of Catherine and Judith Cittadini in trusting abandonment to God, faithful and provident, in spousal love for Christ Crucified in fraternal communion of life, in simple and joyful dedication to brothers and sisters, especially to the young generations.

Charism

In spiritual harmony with the sisters who preceded us, we live the charism, entrusted by the Spirit to Catherine and Judith and transmitted to the Congregation, in docile openness to the Church’s demands and with attention to the situations of our time to be always and everywhere educator apostles.

In a community totally dedicated to educational charity, we witness our vocation to holiness by promoting and harmonizing “the divine and the human, the Gospel and culture, faith and life” in various contexts, with particular attention to the new generations.

In this mission, we are called to be a credible sign of the values of the Kingdom, in the personal and community following of Christ, chaste, poor and obedient. Faithful to the spirit of the origins, we share our apostolic spirituality also with the laity, sharing the co-responsibility of educational service.

Spirituality

In dynamic fidelity to the spirit of the origins, following the example of the Foundresses and the sisters who preceded us and have vitally preserved the charism entrusted to the Congregation, we express our apostolic spirituality, witnessing in every situation the primacy of God’s love through the educational mission.

In total abandonment to God we live the same sentiments of Christ, the crucified Spouse, to progressively conform ourselves to Him and to be a credible sign of His redemptive love.

We read and pray over personal, community and social events; we assiduously meditate on the Word of God to intensify our contemplative capacity and the ardor of apostolic action and to seek the Lord’s ways in the signs of the times.

Mission

We work for the integral formation of the person as educator apostles in different sociocultural contexts. We express the specificity of our mission in the Church through human promotion and Christian education, especially of youth, and the accompaniment of particular situations of distress and suffering, in a dynamism of charity that makes us capable of becoming all things to all people and to each one in particular.

With the help of the Spirit and in the light of the Word and the magisterium, we carry out an attentive reading of reality and a constant discernment of the signs of the times to educate ourselves to develop new evangelization projects together for today’s situations. We also commit ourselves to caring for our professional preparation and to deepening our competencies for a qualified realization of the educational mission.

In a planning dynamism, capable of valorizing charismatic complementarity, we collaborate with the different socio-ecclesial components and share with the laity the educational responsibility through the proposal of systematic formative itineraries and significant forms of participation.