MSC General Leadership Team Letter. December 8th, 2025

MISSIONARIES OF THE SACRED HEART
171 YEARS OF GRACE AND MISSION
Reading the signs of the times
1854 – 2025

Dear Confreres,

On this December 8th, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, we celebrate 171 years since the Spirit inspired Fr. Jules Chevalier to dream a new path for the Church and for humanity. It was a small, almost impossible dream, like the cry of Bartimaeus (Mk 10:46-52) rising above the noise, yet because it came from the Heart of Jesus, it continues to resonate today in so many corners of our Mother Earth. This year, that resonance found a luminous expression in the canonization of Peter To Rot, lay catechist and martyr from Papua New Guinea, the first saint of the Chevalier Family, whose witness confirms that our Charism remains fruitful in every culture and in every age.

One hundred and seventy-one years have passed since our Charism first took flesh in history, and yet it remains a humble and resilient force of humanization. Your lives, your mission, and your dedication, together with the whole Chevalier Family, continue to embody that foundational inspiration: to respond to the modern wounds of our world with the meekness, humility, and boldness of the Heart of Jesus.

Today, the cries of the earth and the cries of so many wounded peoples are no less intense than in Chevalier’s time. Their suffering runs through wars, migration, poverty, abuse, indifference, and structural violence. And their cries now echo in a new landscape where artificial intelligence and digital technology are shaping how people think, feel, and believe. We live in a world where algorithms learn faster than hearts, where screens mediate many of our relationships, and where the human can easily become secondary.

Precisely for this reason, our Charism is urgent and countercultural. We are called to reveal the face of a God who continues to love with a human Heart, not an artificial one. In a time of artificial intelligences, tenderness remains the powerful force that can transform technology and social media into bridges that bring people closer rather than walls that isolate, opening paths for us to build communion, nearness, and genuine humanity.

May this anniversary find us renewing the prophetic courage of hospitality, capable of creating real conversations, within our MSC communities and with the People of God, amid so many voices that compete, confuse, and manipulate. More than ever, we need a spirituality that does not run away from the digital world but passes through it with humanity, beauty, and truth.

It is precisely in this context that we lived our MSC General Conference, a moment in which we sought to walk together, building structures that serve, while keeping our feet firmly on the ground. We know that dreams that do not become concrete, measurable, and accountable processes simply evaporate. For this reason, our mission today requires participation, collaboration, and the humble realism of those who offer their small but essential contribution, knowing that no one is excluded from this shared responsibility.

This anniversary, lived amid so much external noise, invites us to return to prayer. To cultivate a generative silence in the midst of the noise that erodes trust and weakens our ability to walk together. Yet today we must go even further: we need a prayer capable of keeping us profoundly human in a world that is fast, fragmented, and tempted by the artificial. A prayer that rescues us from digital automatism, restores the depth of our souls, and teaches us to listen before speaking and to look before reacting.

This return to the silence of the Heart leads us to one of the deepest needs of our time: to grow in the attitude of discernment. Personal and communal discernment, slow, evangelical, responsible, able to read the signs of the times, interpret reality, embrace our contradictions, and make decisions with compassion and hope. Jesus is the centre of all discernment, and only in Him do we learn to see with clarity and choose with love. Only a life rooted in prayer and authentic discernment can sustain our mission amid so much complexity and dehumanization.

May Our Lady of the Sacred Heart intercede so that every celebration of this 171st. Anniversary in your communities becomes an opportunity to rekindle our mission, embracing our fragilities without fear: for it is through our cracks that mercy seeps through and the face of God becomes visible in today’s world.

Thank you, dear Confreres, for remaining devoted to the mission and for risking your lives, for being present as witnesses where humanity bleeds, where Mother Earth cries out, and where so many are wounded by war, poverty, or abuse. Thank you for embodying, sometimes quietly and sometimes at significant risk, the cry of Bartimaeus, who refuses to stop calling out to Jesus, believing that another world is possible.

May the Heart of Jesus continue giving us new eyes to see and a new heart to love.

In Corde Iesu,

Mario Abzalón Alvarado Tovar [Writ.]

Chris Chaplin

Bram Tulusan

Simon Lumpini

Gene Pejo

Carl Tranter

MSC GENERAL LEADERSHIP TEAM