For Christians in areas of conflict:
Let us pray that Christians living in areas of war or conflict, especially in the Middle East, might be seeds of peace, reconciliation, and hope.

Dear members of the Vincentian Family,

May the Lord Jesus, source of true Hope, who gives light to minds and instills peace in hearts, be with us always!

At the beginning of Advent, a time of waiting and hope, I would like to share with you an idea that comes from the heart of our charism and our spirituality: to live our waiting for the Lord in the concreteness of charity.

Advent is not only a time of liturgical preparation for Christmas, but also a journey of conversion of our vision, to learn to recognize Jesus who continually comes to meet us in the faces and persons of the poor, the little ones, and the marginalized. It is a time when the Word of God invites us to watch, but also to act, to allow ourselves to be touched by the wounds of the world, and to become credible signs of Jesus’s love.

During this Advent, I invite you to reawaken the mysticism of charity: that which is born of the silence of prayer, grows in daily service, and becomes reality in fraternal communion. This is not the first time I have invited you to reflect on the mysticism of charity, because I believe that its “practice” allows us to act according to the very heart of Christian life. It is in charity that faith becomes visible, that hope is translated into action, and that waiting for Jesus becomes a daily encounter with his presence in the poor.

The Vincentian Family is invited today, as always, to love the poor according to the heart of Jesus, without seeking personal gain. Our hearts must burn with charity according to the spirit of the Gospel, as Saint Vincent de Paul writes: “… a heart truly filled with charity, which understands what it is to love God, wouldn’t want to go to God unless God anticipated him and attracted him by His grace. That’s a far cry from wanting to carry God away and draw Him to himself by hook or by crook. No, no; in those cases, nothing is gained by force. When God wants to communicate himself, He does it effortlessly, in a perceptible, very pleasant, gentle, loving way…” (CCD XI, 207-208).

On 19 September 2016, writing for the first time to the Vincentian Family as Superior General, I invited you to reflect on the figure and work of Saint Vincent de Paul, mystic of charity; later, I called you to deepen, in the light of our Constitutions and Common Rules, the pillars of Saint Vincent’s spirituality that made him a mystic of charity: the Incarnation (Advent 2016), the Holy Trinity (Lent 2017), and the Eucharist (Advent 2017).

Vincent’s innovative approach is clear to all of us simply because it follows the mysticism of love that Jesus lived in the dynamic of the Incarnation and made visible in history. In the words and actions of the Incarnate Word of God, Love takes flesh in Jesus, consisting of listening to the needs of the people, proclamation of the liberating Word, and effective works aimed at promoting every human person, elevated to the dignity of a child of God. Every teaching of Saint Vincent aspires to reaffirm the mystical dimension of the gift that came to human beings without any merit on their part in the Incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth.

In the Vincentian Family, mission finds meaning and nourishment in the mystery of charity, where Jesus is mystically seen in the poor. Just as the Son of God became flesh in a child, humbly laid in the humility of a manger, so he is present in the poor. For all of us, this is the source of the spirituality of love for our neighbor, which passes through Jesus and reaches the poor. The Word of God invites us to live concretely the service of our brothers and sisters in their material and spiritual needs.

In this Advent 2025, I invite you to rediscover the truth of vision, which not only makes us dream of the coming of God in the concreteness of humanity, but also allows us to nurture and nourish what theologian Johann Baptist Metz has called the mysticism of open eyes. The Vincentian Family is called today to renew every dimension in the fervor of Love: prayer, the mission of charity, fraternal life, the proclamation of the Gospel to the poor, and Christian witness in society. Jesus calls us in this time of waiting to practice once again the hard work of the fruits of love, according to the teaching that Saint Paul gave us in the Hymn to Charity!

Keeping our eyes open means committing ourselves to a spirituality of concreteness, responsibly exercising our mandate as a Family of Charity in the name of Love incarnate. In fact, to paraphrase Metz, it is charity that makes us vigilant, keeps us awake, and opens our eyes to reality, but only if it is rooted in the Love that is Jesus. This Love is the cornerstone that nourishes the life of Saint Vincent and that of the entire Family he desired. “Charity,” said Saint Vincent, “is above all Rules, and everything comes down to that. If it’s a woman of rank, you have to do what she tells you” (CCD X, 478).

If we want to live the mysticism of charity with our eyes open, we must strive to make the waiting of Advent an exercise of zeal for the salvation of souls.

The mysticism of charity with open eyes shows us, during this Advent season, the concreteness of the vision of each one of us. We are sent to convert our material and spiritual eyes. Sometimes our eyes are dulled by despair and could fall into indifference. There may be those who, while declaring themselves Samaritans (cf. Luke 10:25-37), may avoid the road from Jerusalem to Jericho … perhaps so as not to meet the eyes of the poor with the eyes of their own opulence. We must return to that road for a concrete and responsible journey in the logic of evangelical industriousness; that is, in the silence of works to bear witness to Charity made flesh.

Revitalizing the zeal of our mission, according to the intention of Saint Vincent, also means restoring dignity to the dreams of the poor with tangible responses, following the example of the Samaritan in the Gospel, who was willing to support and accompany the desperate wait of the unfortunate man, confident that he would receive an act of love, precisely because the poor, whatever their condition, “dream, but need someone to interpret their dreams,” as writes a venerable member of the Church, Bishop Tonino Bello.

Jesus asks us to convert our hearts so that we can combine Charity and Justice. Hoping in charity means living the mysticism of charity with our eyes open, with the zeal prescribed by Saint Vincent, which has its source in Jesus. In fact, “If love of God is a fire, zeal is its flame; if love is a sun, zeal is its ray. Zeal is unconditional in the love of God” (CCD XII, 250).

A mysticism of charity with open eyes truly knows how to be the expectation and fulfillment of Jesus’s promises when all persons are recognized for their dignity and not evaluated according to the logic of profit or on the basis of social conditions and economic possibilities. In fact, writes theologian Metz, “the Christian faith is, in any case, a faith that seeks justice. Certainly, Christians are always mystics, but they are not exclusively mystics in the sense of a spiritual experience of themselves, but in the sense of a spiritual experience of solidarity. They are first and foremost ‘mystics with open eyes.’ Their mysticism is not a natural, faceless mysticism. Rather, it is a mysticism that seeks the face, which leads first and foremost to an encounter with others who suffer, to an encounter with the faces of the unfortunate and the victims.”

It is now time to live the mystical dimension of the Vincentian Family that is part of the Church’s mission. In this Advent season that we are about to experience, not only must we meditate on this challenge, but also we must commit ourselves to making our mission more evangelical. More than 50 years have passed since Karl Rahner, the great theologian of the 20th century, wrote one of the most prophetic and well-known phrases about faith during the Council debates. The phrase we have heard and repeated many times is this: “The Christian of the 21st century will either be a ‘mystic’—that is, a person who has ‘experienced’ something—or will not even be a Christian.” Now is the favorable time to make this prophecy a reality by working concretely in charity to live mysticism with open eyes; that is, recognizing Jesus, who comes to us, in the poor.

May this time of grace of the Lord’s coming among us find us vigilant in love, capable of making the Father’s tenderness visible and of proclaiming the Good News to the poor with words and deeds, giving life to their dreams with concreteness, responsibility, and trust in the Jesus of hope who comes to us in the poverty of the manger.

Your brother in Saint Vincent,

Tomaž Mavrič, CM 

Superior General of the Congregation of the Mission and the Company of the Daughters of Charity.

UPCOMING EVENTS

FY25/26 

Board meetings take place every other 3rd Friday of the month. 

All Vincentians are welcome to attend.

• _{January 16 - Board Meeting}
• _{January 24 - Ozanam San Ysidro - Corrales}
• _{March 20 - Board Meeting} 
• _{April 25 – Annual All-Conference Meeting – Belen} 
• _{May 15 - Board Meeting} 
•   _{Board Training}
• _{July 17 – Board Meeting}
• _{September 18 - Board Meeting}
• _{November 20 – Board Meeting} 

If your District Council or Conference has special event dates, please send them to me so we can include them on our calendar.

Hello everyone! We are excited to participate in fundraising on Giving Tuesday with two initiatives this year. 

For those who may be unfamiliar with Giving Tuesday, it is an international informal event in which non-profits post fundraising initiatives with the intent of engaging prospective donors. This year Giving Tuesday falls on Tuesday, December 2. 

Our campaigns:

Albuquerque Journal (pictured above)

I wanted to make you aware that we have a 1-page print ad out in the ABQ Journal Giving Guide (which came out on Thanksgiving Day). The companion virtual ad can be viewed here. 

Peer-to-Peer Campaign (sneak peek pictured below)

On Monday (in anticipation of Giving Tuesday) we plan to launch a peer-to-peer online fundraising campaign titled Neighbors Feeding Neighbors with a goal of providing $10,000 worth of additional food to the community by way of our current food distribution sites. In other words, the money that we raise will be available to be accessed by our SVdP operating food sites. (More to come on how that process will work in the next month.)

How can you help? On Monday (Dec 1) I will send out a link to the campaign. Even though Giving Tuesday doesn't officially start until Tuesday (Dec 2), it is ok (and encouraged) to get ahead of the game and start sending the campaign out on Monday. :-) Please help us to share that link with family and friends who you think may be interested by email and social media. If we reach out goal quickly, we will likely close the campaign and promote general donations for the rest of the month/year. If we haven't reached our goal within several days, we may leave the campaign open to see how close we can get to our goal. We will be in touch with those details as the campaign progresses. When posting on socials, please use the hashtags #GivingTuesday and #NeighborsFeedingNeighborsSVdPASF. 

Conference Highlight - St Francis Xavier 

Our Albuquerque Thrift Store would like to give a massive shout out to the St. Francis Xavier Conference, which has been joyfully helping to sort, prepare, and price a huge selection of Christmas items from our warehouse. Judy and team have been on site in our warehouse multiple times a week every week since September(!), culminating in support for a doorbuster sale on Black Friday. Thank you to all who helped from this Conference! Your service processed many warehoused holiday items that we would otherwise not have had capacity to price and get to the store, which will translate to sales and support for our community and mission! Your smiling faces have brightened our days and shown us what faith in action looks like.

Thank you to Judy Bassett, Sarah Sandoval, Margaret Gallegos, Eduvijen Garcia, and Cathy Maestas for your months of tireless service. 

Thank you for your service and sacrifice as a Vincentian. If you need any support or have any questions, please reach out by replying to this email or giving us a call.