A Certain Idea of the Society of Mary: Jean-Claude Colin

Having been invited to speak to you about Jean-Claude Colin on this celebration of the Bi-centenary of his birth, I could have prepared a carefully worked-out conference on one or other aspect of his life or attempted a synthesis of his personality, his contribution to the Church and to our religious families. In fact, I […]

Colin’s Original Vision and its Implications

The title of the workshop is: Marist Tradition and Today’s Marist. My contribution, which is only part of the workshop, has its own title, if you like, which is this: “A Certain Idea of the Society of Mary: Colin’s original vision and its implication.” I would like to start with a few words about this […]

Mary, Mother of Mercy

The starting point for Colin and all the first Marists was the conviction that Mary wanted something. This was not based on any specific revelation. Their conviction was that Mary wanted something, and the society of Mary exists because of that. But what did Mary want? Let us try to express more this supposed wish […]

Anticipation of the New People of God

We have seen that the Society of Mary started from an awareness, the conviction of a desire, that Mary wished to save all her children, gathering them into a new people of God. Therefore, our center of gravity is eschatological. The center is not our Society, which happens to be called “of Mary,” but really, […]

Instruments of Divine Mercy

We have seen that there is this wish of Mary to do something for the Church. In this stage of the history of the Church to make an ultimate effort to gather and to save all her children, because she is the Mother of Mercy, and therefore she wants to embrace all the world. Furthermore, […]

No to Greed

Up to now, we have presented Colin’s vision. Now we will move into the realm of implications at two levels: the level of certain spiritual implications and certain other implications in the level of structure. We are now starting on what has already been called several times in this room, the three great “No’s” of […]

No to Power

We are coming to the third and last of the great No’s of Fr. Colin. The third No deals with forms of power where the key person in decision-making uses his power for his own purposes. This is the third attitude that Father Colin will try to fight with the same strength he fought the […]

Government in the Society of Mary

We are trying to explore Colin’s original vision and its implication for our life today. Now we’ll see the implication of Colin’ s vision at the level of structure. We have seen that the center of gravity of Colin’s vision is eschatological. Colin is looking into the future, into a new people of God, gathered […]

Next Page »