“You empty the barn, you fill the fields”
From Emilia Romagna, the story of the three Chiletti sisters and their choice of consecrated and missionary life
The fruit never falls far from the tree. And those who come from the farming world know this more than anyone, as in the Chiletti family, from Fiorano Modenese, where it is anything but a figure of speech.
Among ten children, Anna, Rosa and Agnese chose the missionary life: all three, a few years apart, in the Congregation of the Missionaries of Mary, founded in 1945 by Giacomo Spagnolo and Celestina Bottego.
“Only God knows why,” says Rosa, 86 years old, 36 of which were in the U.S. among the needy and elderly in Boston and Harlem, and which she treasures in her heart today in the Mother House in Parma.
But then she speaks of a daily routine punctuated by her parents’ testimony and an ever-open door.
“The family has been the place of faith and formation in the meaning of the other,” adds the youngest, Agnese, 74, who before arriving in Cava de’ Tirreni, Salerno, was 14 years in Sierra Leone, five in China and 12 in Thailand, including a 56-day kidnapping in 1995 by RUF rebels.
Few theories and “practical life teaching,” the Xaverian continues. “Small gestures that have made a strong impact on each of us, such as not serving each other first at the table, sharing a candy, seeking agreement after a scuffle, giving refreshment to the poor, lifting someone from a burden”.
Anna, the second of ten children and the first to enter the Institute, died in 2012 from fulminant leukemia in Brazil, where she had lived since 1957. She was 18 when she left her home, where “every evening we prayed prayers for the missions together.” They were all enrolled in the Missionary Childhood.
Her tomb in Parana speaks of “a faithfulness and love” that God sowed in simplicity, as Rosa recalls, “it was not
easy but it was real life, lived in mutual respect among parents, siblings, cousins, uncles and grandparents.”
Of this context filled with values, Agnese remembers “Mama Luigia depriving herself of beans in an already poor soup and the teacher urging to use the possessive pronoun ‘our’ instead of ‘my.’”
The Chiletti sisters, missionaries “to whom no one ever weighed the choice they made,” in the postwar period were “arms taken away from agricultural work,” but, as Rosa concludes, “you empty the barn and fill the fields,” because where you sow with abundance “life multiplies.”
(Loredana Brigante, Popoli e Missione)
Source
- Popoli e Missione, May 2021, p. 21
Image
- Family photo (sent by Sr. Agnese Chiletti)