From 19-30 November, the FSP Generalate in Rome, Italy hosted a Hermeneutics Seminar on the personal notebooks of Maestra Thecla. Participating in the course were the sisters of the International Secretariat for Spirituality, plus several other sisters from Japan, Brazil, the United States, the Philippines and Madagascar.
This year the hermeneutics team, already well-versed in the methodology of this science since its members participated in the four preceding seminars on the subject, focused its attention on Maestra Thecla’s spiritual notes for the years 1931-1939. So as to understand the content of her writings, which are profound but also colored by the times in which she lived, it was necessary to reflect more deeply on the congregational and spiritual context of that era and on how Maestra Thecla experienced becoming “prima” (“first”) in everything, that is: the Mother, Formator and Superior of a Congregation in the process of expanding throughout Italy, sending its first missionaries abroad and coming to a deeper understanding of its mission in the Church.
Her personal notes, which reveal her persevering efforts to improve spiritually, also reflect her transparency, her commitment to replacing self with God, and her progress in humility and union with him.
Maestra Thecla was obedient even when she walked in the dark, when she was afflicted with illness, when her opinions were discounted, and when she underwent a true Calvary during the difficult discernment concerning the feminine Congregations of the Pauline Family.
But she makes no reference to all these burdensome situations in her personal notes. The thoughts she records reveal only her concern to deepen her relationship with the Lord by growing in a spirit of self-surrender–an attitude that would become very characteristic of her in the years that followed and that would culminate in the offering of her entire life to him.
At the end of the seminar, the participants made some suggestions as to how to give continuity to their work. First of all, they feel the need to refine and perfect the two texts produced in their previous encounters (M. Thecla’s notebooks for the years 1926-30 and 1931-39) so that they can be used for research purposes and provide Prima Maestra’s future biographers with authoritative insights.
In addition, the hermeneutics team feels it is necessary to continue to study the remaining notebooks of the series, contextualizing this material in such a way as to make it understandable and accessible to the FSPs, including by drawing on Prima Maestra’s letters to the sisters, which shed a bright light on her holiness, wise guidance and enthusiasm for the Pauline apostolate.