We are a religious congregation of priests and brothers who live a simple lifestyle in small communities called teams, where we try to live out the gospel together.

 We believe that the God of Jesus is especially close to the poor and humble, the people that others don’t care about.  Our charity flows from God’s charity.  Jesus “the Good Shepherd who knows and loves his sheep and who has concern for the wounded and lost” is the one we admire and want to emulate.  

 We want to share God’s perspective and to see as God sees in those places of brokenness like the poor neighborhoods of the large urban concentrations.  It is to those that the masses of workers, the underemployed, and the poorest people come from all parts of the country.  

 We love these people, and we know how important they are.  Together with them we discover these challenges:  a thirst for spirituality; unemployment; unstable employment and overwhelming poverty; young people who feel out of place; people fleeing countries that are in conflict and ruin; the challenge of living together, which is not easy; the dialogue that needs to be promoted among different cultures and religions.    

Through our ministries as parish priests, worker priests, and priests responsible for different pastoral works, we try to help people build healthy and fervent Christian communities that are God-centered, committed, welcoming, and open to dialogue and collaboration with those who want to improve our neighborhoods and make them more human. 

 We want to help every person, especially young people, to experience a God who wants us to be happy and who makes us human. 

Fr. Anizan meditated on Jesus’ encounter with people who came to him seeking salvation: “Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee, went up on the mountain, and sat down there.” (Mt 15:29ff)

 Before he came to know and identify with Jesus the Good Shepherd, our founder identified with the people who came to Jesus.  Like the crowds, he contemplates Jesus and exclaims:  “I have been seeking you, Lord Jesus, for a long time; I will find you only on the holy mountain, and I will   live with You.  Bring me up there to that mountain!”  (Misereor super turbam, 1916)

 The “holy mountain,” the place of encounter with God, is in the midst of the crowds:  the crowds of people who come looking for the salvation that can only come from God’s love.  That is why our search for God has to happen through communion with others who, like each of us, live a constant seeking after salvation.  Pastoral love is the very embodiment of this communion; without this communion, our love might veer off into self-sufficient paternalism.

 This communion with others makes it possible for our love of God and love of the people to become one in us, that is, to become the experience of the good shepherd.  Everything in our life becomes imbued with the presence of the crowds:  the search for God, charity, our individual relationship with God, our action, mission, etc. This is pastoral love, translated into prayer and action.  And that is why our religious life, whether we are lay persons or priests, is necessarily pastoral, of the same loving compassion which Jesus the Good Shepherd showed for the people who went about “bowed down and mistreated like sheep without a shepherd.”

 José Miguel Sopeña, fc
Superior General, Sons of Charity

Ours is an apostolic congregation:  We consider ourselves sent forth, like the Christian community of Antioch, which lived a dynamic of announcement and which sent forth some of its members on mission.  This dynamic is both our richness and our trial.  It is our vocation, a beautiful vocation.     

Our founder, Fr. Anizan, wants us to follow Jesus in his public life, because that is where Jesus really came out of himself.        

 Our founder asks us to live in fraternity as apostles, which is the very least we can do. He wanted this fraternity to develop into a common life, a complete sharing of everything.  He knew the demands of fraternal life and of a serious prayer life would be hard for us, and he said, “We will live it the way Jesus lived it.”

Recent Chapters have magnificently affirmed that the review of life is the specific place where the many dimensions of our religious and apostolic life come together. The review of life is an important sign of the particular character of our religious and apostolic life. 

 What we are most adept at is not singing long psalmodies, or passing long hours in silence, or making great theological reflections.  What we know best, what we do spontaneously and with joy, is discover how grace is at work in the heart of the people; we are witnesses, accomplices, collaborators, and, most of all, beneficiaries of this work of grace.  These are not anecdotes in which we find our nourishment, but rather pages of the gospel.  These experiences are the center of gravity of our spiritual life and of our religious life as apostles.

Joseph de Mijolla, fc

The “Sons’ spirit” which Fr. Anizan left us and which underlies our life and action is inspired by Vincentian spirituality.    

 Our spirituality is a product of Anizan’s life story, which was filled with a dual passion:  “passion for God” and “passion for the people.”

First element:  Having compassion for the popular masses, as Jesus did

Jesus “was filled with compassion for the crowds of tired and abandoned people” of his time.  Today, we hear the same call to live out this compassion for the workers and the masses of poor people.   

We let ourselves be touched by people’s material and spiritual poverty, and also by their richness; joining with them to take action is to enter into the history of a God who is lovesick for the small and humble people.  It is to join a Father God who has a mother’s heart:  the God of compassion, the merciful God of Jesus.

The Jesus we strive to reach is the God-Man, whose heart is moved at the sight of the many workers, unemployed people, and families that come to settle at the outskirts of the world’s great cities.  How can they know of God’s tender care for each one, if no one offers himself to Christ today and is willing to walk by their side?

 Second element:  Receiving from the Spirit the folly of charity 

The folly of charity is nothing more than the craziness of loving in a world that is all too prudent and calculating.  It is a crazy love, which believes that the spirit of love enkindled in the human heart at Pentecost is still present and at work everywhere; and present in a special way in the poor and working-class neighborhoods, where it is often thought to be absent.  It is a love that seeks to “to save the love” of the humble people with countless daily gestures of self-giving and solidarity, inviting each person to conversion so that all can find their place in the civilization of love.

The Jesus we want to emulate is the God-man whose heart, filled with the Spirit, loves as God loves and who never stops wanting to save what is human and what is divine in the homeless, in those who are denied their rights, in those without voice, without work, and without a future.  They are the ones who have a privileged place in God’s heart.  

Third element:  Placing ourselves in the Father’s hands

Sheer willpower isn’t enough to live the dual ideal of compassion for the masses and the folly of charity.  Such a commitment isn’t even halfway possible, if we don’t learn how to place our lives in God’s hands.  It is a question of having the attitude of figuring out what God’s plans are and of responding to them through human initiatives.  It means having the wisdom to act not so much from the impulse of our personal desires, but out of God’s will, as we discern it in meditating on his Word, celebrating the Eucharist, and sharing life in community.

The Jesus we want to emulate is the Jesus, the One Sent, who at the core of his mission gave his heart and soul to announcing the Gospel to the poor.  We believe that all the strength of the faith, hope, and love that worked in him, can also take over our weakness and infidelities.  This is the force that turns us into “apostles of the people,” men with hearts and hands ready to seek the Invisible One, ready to put ourselves in his service and ready to announce him in the lives of the people of our cities and neighborhoods. 

This is not a spirituality reserved for priests and religious.  It is a strong spirituality that is adapted to our streets and to our ways of working.  It can serve for workers, unemployed persons, the very poor, mothers and fathers.  It is spirituality for children and young people, as well as for adults, a spirituality adapted to each person in his or her place in this life. 

Michel Retailleau, fc