ABCs of Mother Clara for all her Children.

Animate all your works with the spirit of faith and sacrifice.

Be good to one another.

Courage, for this life is just for two days and Heaven is for all eternity.

Do not be presumptuous in your words and your work.

Every one in general and each one in particular, hands to the task… living only

   for God.

Faith works wonders.

God is pleased with the efforts of the humble.

How good God is! May He be blessed!

If you see something good in you, remember they are pure gifts of God.

Jesus, the Sun of justice, eclipses just for a while, in order to reappear later in

  greater splendor.

Kindness and meekness of little children towards all, is what God wants from

   you.

Let us not be overcome by difficulties.

Much will be asked from the one to whom much is given; and so it is necessary

   to acquire merits worthy of our sublime vocation!

Nothing happens in the world without divine permission!

Oh, yes, it is necessary to be generous with God who has been so generous to

   us.

Peace is the true gift of souls, who serve the Lord well in this world.

Quite a painful Calvary, several times I feel, now…let us carry our cross of

   resignation…(Positio Vol I, Pg.59).

Receive everything as coming from the hands of God Who permits everything for our good.

Series of graces have been granted to us from moment to moment, who can deny this ?

Try to be very united, practicing the great virtue of charity, with greater perfection

  than you have done till now.

Union is the source of peace.

Vineyard of the Lord, is where we are, called to the sublime mission of 

  cooperating in the salvation of souls, practicing the works of mercy.

We must work not so much for the recompense, but solely to witness to the good God our gratitude for all He has given us.

eXcuse rather than accuse others; there is no fault that they commit that we will not also commit, if the Lord withdraws His grace from us, just for an instant.

You must interpret everything well.

Zeal for the glory of God is expressed in fervent and diligent sacrifices.

                                   

The ABCs of Mother Clara for her sisters.

A Providential glance of God watches over us.

Be simply and perfectly subject to all.

Courage then, dear daughters, because this life is just two days and heaven is  

   for all eternity!

Desire to be always the last of your sisters.

Every one in general and each one in particular, hands to the task…living only for

   God.

Forward then, because for a moment of combat, an eternity of glory has been

   promised us.

Great and inscrutable are the designs of God.

Have no wish other than that of your Superiors, your equals and inferiors.

In the midst of great tempests, there always arises an increase of good for our

 Congregation.

Jesus, the Sun of justice, eclipses just for a while, in order to reappear later in

  greater splendor

Kindness and meekness of little children towards all your sisters, is what God wants from you.

Let us work in a spirit of penance.

My soul glorifies the Lord, because He has worked miracles on our Calvary!

Nothing happens in the world without divine permission.

Obedience and silence are the base of the Religious Life.

Put up with one another with charity, without being astonished at the defects of

  your sisters.

Quite a painful Calvary, several times I feel, now…let us carry our cross of

   resignation…(Positio Vol I, Pg.59)

Receive everything as from the hands of God Who permits everything for our

   good.

Sincerity of a religious soul does not consist in many words…

The lack of unity that exists among the sisters results from a lack of humility and knowledge of oneself.

Unhappy the Congregation that does not have good and solid vocations.

Vocation…how much are we not indebted to God, only for our religious vocation?

Watch over yourselves, not to appear hurt when someone helps you on the way of perfection, reminding you of your faults.

eXcuse rather than accuse, when you observe some defect in your sisters…

Yet I do this (writing an admonition), most willingly, because I have the hope of some fruit being drawn…

Zeal for the glory of God is expressed in fervent and diligent sacrifices.  

CTN OF MOTHER CLARA

Once again, Libania is ready to move on, trusting in God’s Providence—equipped by those nuns in study, work, prayer and reflection to face the ups and downs of life.

By now, she had felt a call to the religious life. She seemed to be at a spiritual crossroad presented by the happenings in her country and occurrences in her own life.

Libania gratefully accepts the invitation from the Marquise of Valada—who considers her as his daughter. There, Libania acts as lady-in-waiting and confidante to the Marchioness for the next few years.

She felt God calling her to deeper things. Seeking tranquility in spending a life totally dedicated to God, she moved to join the Boarding at St. Patrick’s Convent in Lisbon. Here would arrive the turning point in Libania’s life and the starting point of the congregation she would go on to found.

The man who stood at that turning point was Fr. Raimundo dos Anjos Beirão. Libania opens her heart to him and allows him to direct her soul. His advice enlightens her path, though she feels it is not easy to follow.

Libania encounters the Christ of Francis and Clare of Assisi—the poor, humble and crucified Lord. This encounter with the Lord and the irresistible attraction that He exercised upon her heart constituted a strong challenge to the yearning and ardent soul of Libania.

Though Libania joined St. Patrick’s Convent as a boarder, two years later (in 1869), she joins a group of Capuchinhas of Our Lady of Conception and pronounces her vows in the Third Order Secular, adding “the promise to the Immaculate Conception” who—prompted by the Holy Spirit—was hospitable to bearing the Child Jesus in her womb. On the same occasion, Libania gives up her illustrious name for good, receiving instead the name Sister Maria Clara do Menino Jesus (Maria Clara of the Child Jesus).

The lamp had been lit. From then on, she lives the adventure of progressive immersion in the mystery of Christ and, participating in His compassion, she penetrates the disconcerting world of human suffering, to illuminate it with joy and to warm it with the tenderness and mercy of God.

She enters now the path of detachment as she immerses herself in obedience to the Father in poverty, humility and minority.

The heart of Fr. Raimundo dos Anjos Beirão sees in Sr. Maria Clara the woman chosen by the Lord, to start with him a congregation that will bend down, in Samaritan attitudes and gestures, upon the wounds of the Portuguese society of the middle of the 19^th century.

However, the very country and society that needed healing was short-sighted towards its own plight and instead had laws that forbade religious professions. Therefore, under Father Beirão’s guidance, Sr. Maria Clara temporarily leaves St. Patricio in February 1870, to make her novitiate in France.

Two days upon return to her country on May 1—in keeping with the orientations from Calais—Fr. Beirão installs Sr. Maria Clara (in the Convent of St. Patricio), as Superior and Mistress of Novices of the Sisters in Lisbon, who adhered to the reform of that group of the Franciscan Tertiaries.

Hence, on 3 May, 1871, comes into existence, the Congregation of the Hospitaller Sisters of the Poor for the Love of God, approved by Pope Pius IX, on 27 March, 1876. In 1964, the Congregation began to be known as the Congregation of the Franciscan Hospitaller Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (CONFHIC).

                                                                     

 The poverty of goods was severe in the convent. The Sisters tried to live of the work they did, but very often their income was not sufficient to supply their own most elementary needs and that of the persons whom they helped. Like Jesus, totally dependent on the Father, Sr. Maria Clara lives an experience of receiving everything from the provident hand of the Lord, even the daily bread for her and for her community.

“I see a providential glance of God watching over us.”

Mother Maria Clara of the Child Jesus

In her last circular dated 29 October, 1899

Even though she experienced the painful moments of her passion in this world, and lived at an adverse socio-political juncture, continues fighting in order that the works of beneficence that emerge from her heart may continue to be taken to all the needy, so that they feel the tenderness and mercy of God.

That is why the Sisters are being sent to lessen the needs, to soothe the pain, to console the sad, to inhabit solitudes; it is the poor, the afflicted, the needy families, the sick, the abandoned, the elderly, the children, the orphans—everybody—whom she calls her people. She becomes a mother of all whom she embraces and warms, guides and supports, heals the wounded hearts with the touch of kindness of her heart.

Thus she fulfils, through the Works of Mercy by the side of the destitute, such interventional service and a transformation of such outreach that, history places her as one of the pioneers of Portuguese social action in the 19^th century.

MOTHER CLARA

An Unknown Someone?

Wherever we are or wherever we go, all of us like to feel comfortable and wanted. When we go to a new place—like a government office to get some work done or a college for admission or a hospital for treatment—it comforts us to personally know someone responsible and trustworthy in that new place. This is a basic human need.

And many times, even though we do not really get to personally meet this someone, we are welcomed in their name and our need fulfilled in their name. That someone remains invisible—at times even unknown.

As someone associated with the St. Isabel’s Hospital community—as a patient, nurse, a student, a doctor, staff or parishioner of the neighbouring Luz Church—you may have experienced the joy of being thus associated. Haven’t you?

Do you know the person behind St. Isabel’s Hospital? That “unknown and invisible someone” who makes you feel at home? In a humble way, this booklet seeks to make known and make visible this someone—she is Mother Maria Clara of the Child Jesus.

Who is Mother Maria Clara?
 


 Libania witnessed and interiorized the fruitlessness of a life empty except for luxury. At 24 now, she was restless to know the way forward for her own life.

Her embrace extends beyond the oceans, in an attempt to reach out to all type of pain, to all abandonment, to all type of dejection. This tenderness and unrestrained mercy take the sisters of Mother Clara to open out horizons and to be the first to venture out into overseas missions.

Baptized as Libânia, she was born in Amadora (in modern day Amadora city in Lisbon, Portugal) on June 15, 1843. She

was baptized in the parish Church of Our Lady of Amparo, Benfica. ‘Amparo’ is a Portuguese word for ‘shelter’ or ‘protection’. She was the daughter of Nuno Tomás de Mascarenhas Galvão Mexia de Moura Telles e Albuquerque and

of Maria da Purificação de Sá Carneiro Duarte Ferreira.

She had a happy childhood as the third of 7 children of a noble and profoundly Christian family. Right from her childhood, her heart began to open to the loving presence of God on account of the Christian witness of her parents.

 Even as a child, she is believed to have been a courteous person with a strong temperament infused with a dignity, delicacy and nobility of character—profiling the heroic personality Libania would turn out to be. No wonder, given the noble ancestry of her parents!

The wonder lies in the doings of God in setting the life of a member from a noble family on a path of sorrow and suffering even while yet an adolescent. The sculpting of the future sister to the poor begins here. In 1856, Libania loses her mother to a cholera epidemic that swept Portugal leveling rich and poor alike.

Her father and siblings became her strength and refuge.

In 1857, Libania lost her father to a wave of yellow fever that swept her country. She is barely 14. As if not to seek to be consoled than to console others, Libania became a ‘little mother’ to her brothers and sisters—with a hope in God’s Providence that seems to emanate from the Christian spirit in enduring suffering.

The time comes for the people, the laughter and the revelry that filled Quinta do Bosque to leave. Two months after her father’s death, Libania and her sister Matilde Henriqueta are admitted into the Royal Asylum of Ajuda, founded by the hospitable King Peter V for the orphans of the noble family, whose parents were victims of the epidemics of 1856 and 1857. In this new home managed by French Sisters—the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, she receives an education and culture proper to a lady of her times: basic study, French, music and feminine courses.

However, experiences of loss and hospitality alternate in Libania’s life.

In May 1862—less than a year after the Royal Asylum loses its protector—with King Peter V himself falling victim to cholera—religious persecution in Portugal leads to these loving French sisters being expelled from the Portuguese territory,