AUDIENCE WITH THE SERVANTS OF MARY IMMACULATE

VATICAN CITY, JUL 6, 1999 (VIS) - At midday today the Pope received the participants in the general chapter of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, of the Byzantine-Ukrainian rite.

"Each institute," the Holy Father said, "is invited to devise a formative project, one inspired by the original charism and that presents in a clear and dynamic fashion the path that must be followed in order to fully assimilate its own spirituality. This project must take into account the fact that the formative process has a very intense initial phase ... which must be united to the permanent phase."

John Paul II recalled that this congregation "is the first in active life of the Byzantine-Ukrainian rite and has as its original task that of educating people's hearts, going to those places where the need is greatest."

"May your concern be that of remaining faithful to that oriental identity which is your own," the Holy Father added, "updating your Constitutions in the light of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, which I promulgated in 1990."

The Pope requested the religious, in living in daily intimacy with Mary Most Holy, to know how to "find in the mystery of her Immaculate Conception an inexhaustable source of conversion, of maturity, of sanctification. A source that, while it wells forth within you, pushes you with the urgency of love to announce and give testimony of Christ to everyone, wherever Providence may call you."

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