VATICAN - The missionary charism of the New Secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life

Tuesday, 10 October 2023 missionary institutes evangelization consecrated life

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Vatican City (Fides News Agency) - The appointment of Sister Simona Brambilla as Secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life is an appointment with a missionary touch. Sister Simona Brambilla belongs to the Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata (MC), where she held the office of Superior General from 2011 to May 2023 and Councilor General from 2005 to 2011. Now she has been appointed by Pope Francis as Secretary at the service of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, of which she has already been a member since 2019.
Born in Monza on March 27, 1965, Sister Brambilla, after graduating as a nurse in 1986, entered the Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Consolata at the age of 23, where she made her first religious profession in 1991. In 1998 she obtained a licentiate in psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the following year she had her first experience as a missionary in Mozambique, which she herself describes as brief but intense and, above all, decisive for her future path.
In Mozambique, Sister Simona worked in youth ministry and in the "Macua Xirima Study Center" in Macúa (Niassa) directed by Father Giuseppe Frizzi IMC (who died in 2021) with whom she had the "grace" to collaborate, as she herself says. In this context she was committed to inculturation and dialogue with a view to the spirituality and wisdom of the Macua people.
The personal experience of living with the Xirima people of Macúa and their living environment was a precious opportunity for me to deepen the meaning of the mission and the mission as a Consolata missionary," writes Sister Brambilla in her report on her experience, "The Wisdom of the Forest," which is available to Fides. "Happy and infected by the Macua perspective, I found myself enjoying and appreciating in a new way the feminine and maternal dimension inherent in our charism. The recognition, respect, hospitality and care for every seed of life present in people, peoples and history appeared to me more than ever as essential and specific characteristics of the missionary work of the Consolata Missionaries" and the image of the "mwapu" (pot in the Macua language) as a place of the interpenetration of the different, as the "kitchen" of life, could not help but refer me back to our Consolata, a point of departure and arrival for us her sons and daughters."
From 2002 to 2002 Sister Brambilla was a professor at the Department of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University and in 2008 she obtained the Doctorate in Psychology at the Pontifical Urbaniana University.
(EG) (Fides News Agency 10/10/2023)