The word of Mother Vojtěcha to novice mistresses:
Surely you have already realized, dear novice mistresses, that the task the congregation gave you is large, demanding and responsible. I assure you that your appointment was not just a momentary idea or a random selection of several names. Certainly not. This was preceded by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, thinking and consideration. The congregation simply trusts you – and expects with confidence that you will invest all your qualities of mind and heart and will make every effort to do good work for the Church and the world in God’s light, in his power and wisdom.
You have to show the way to young sisters, lead them to holiness.
You have to shape the personalities of the girls of today, who wish to live the ideal of the merciful Christ, so that they intensively live again and again according to the Gospel and they find – in the Borromeo charisma and in the fulness of the spirituality of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo – their usefulness in charity lived in contemplation. It requires from the novice mistress’s side: great diligence, careful preparation, further education, many sacrifices, and especially the sanctity of life.
Therefore, every novice mistress has a responsability before God and the congregation to use all appropriate means so that her upbringing touches the whole person, the spiritual, mental and physical area, as well as the mind and the heart.
It is essentials that the education is theoretical as well as practical. Because it has to lead to not only formal fulfillment but also to inned conviction, we proceed in an organic way – from minor to more demanding rquirements, from easier to more complicated ones.
Novice mistress in this service:
- Is patient but consistent;
- Is modest but firm;
- Always acts with love, but does not confuse the kindness of autority with weakness;
- Awakens in sisters an active cooperation on thein own education;
- Uses teaching and personal interviews to help develop human and religious personality of each one;
- Leads to a personal responsibility;
- Leads to right decision-making;
- Leads to the right use of freedom;
- Traches how to serve others jointly and
- how to improve not only her life but also the life of the whole community.
She conscientiously cultivates her loyalty to the Church as a special sign of the Borromeo Order. Religious beliefs have to be and remain a fundamental element of the Sisters of Mercy of the St. Charles Borromeo since the beginning.
It is necessarily important that every novice mistress has a love for her service. The souls that God entrusted to her: candidates, novices and juniors have to be her “hobby”.
Another condition of a blessed succes of the service of a novice mistress is her unity with the sister superior. All the time we speak of renewal. If our communities are in need of an internal renewal then it is a renewal of love and unity.
It is the sister superior and the novice mistress that have to show the ideal of their mutual relationship, as well as they both have to show this ideal in relation to other sisters. True love must be manifested in deeds.
Mother Vojtěcha at the Meeting of novice mistresses, December 1977