• Be Ready to Be Cracked Open (Gwendolyn Hoeffel, rscj)

    In 1964 as college graduation and the next step in my life approached, I made a weekend retreat to pray about what next. I wanted to enter but I knew in my gut that it was too soon. I was interested from an easy age in “missionary life” in another country. At that time there…

  • Say ‘yes’ to reality (Margaret Conroy, rscj)

    It is easy for me to write about what it means to be a missionary in the spirit of Philippine. I entered back in 1951 on November 17th for the feast of Blessed Philippine and felt a deep attraction to her spirit of prayer and austerity even then. Later in the 1950’s, after my vows,…

  • The mission is the sending (Carol Burk, rscj)

    The Missions were never a general calling for me, but when I was a first year novice I did receive a call from God to go to Sweden. Never mind that we had no house there or that I had never thought about Sweden at all and had no contact with that country. The call…

  • Why I went to the Missions (Judy Vollbrecht, rscj)

    My sense that God was calling me to the msns began when I was in 1st grade. We were reading a Holy Childhood magazine about the ‘pagan babies’ in China. When we finished, I knew that God was calling me to be a missionary in Africa. It was a conviction that never left me. When,…