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Opening Words of the Superior General – Visita Ad Limina Gathering for New Provincial Leaders (MSC)

Dear Brothers,

Welcome to this house, which is a sign of communion at the heart of our Congregation. It is a great joy to receive you here—not as visitors passing through, but as brothers who share the responsibility of animating the life and mission of our charism in your lands.

Traditionally, we have called this meeting a Visita Ad Limina. But today, we know that name no longer says it all. What we are living here is more than a visit to the structures of the Generalate. It is a leadership workshop and a fraternal space for encounter, shared discernment, and deep listening. It is an opportunity to savour together what it means today to be leaders according to the Heart of Jesus.

This gathering is not something that has all been prepared in advance. We will build it together. You have not come here to receive lessons from great professors, nor to teach or show who knows more. We are here to learn from each other, to listen with honesty and respect, and to build a community of leadership rooted in humility, truth, and openness of heart.

We are also living in a time of structural transformation. We face real challenges: fragile community relationships, urgent safeguarding issues, financial tensions, and growing expectations of transparency. In the midst of all this, leadership can be a heavy burden, and often a lonely one. This space is also meant to be a place of refuge—where you may find support, encouragement, and renewed meaning to serve with fidelity and hope.

We are not here to offer formulas or ready-made answers. We have come to learn from one another, with humility and hope. The leadership we need today is not found in manuals, but in the Gospel. A post-conventional leadership with a synodal soul—emerging from an embodied spirituality that is compassionate and generative.

We seek a leadership that listens before speaking, discerns before acting, and accompanies rather than directs. A leadership that reads the signs of the Spirit in the small, the uncertain, and the not-yet-understood.

This gathering is also a time to support one another, to laugh together, to share the joys and struggles of the service each one has embraced. No one walks alone. We are one body. And the Heart of Jesus beats in every province, every community, every periphery where we are present.

May these days help us to keep cultivating a way of leading with mercy, prophetic creativity, boldness, and tenderness. May we learn to walk with others, not ahead of them. And may each of you feel sustained by the prayer and the trust of the entire Congregation.

Welcome, brothers. This is your home. And this is also a new stage of the journey we are called to walk… together.

Mario Abzalón Alvarado Tovar MSC