Curated by the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption. General coordination by Giuseppe Feyles and Ubaldo Casotto.

 

“Father Pernet found in the need of the people, in the context where he lived, a gaze to make the work of Another, the work of Christ, Christ at work enter in those homes, in those neighborhoods. He made it enter there.” Father Luigi Giussani

The Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption was born from the encounter of the charismas of two people: Father Pernet, French Assumptionist who lived in the nineteenth century, and Father Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation Movement. Father Pernet had been deeply impressed by the situation of poverty in which working families in the suburbs of Paris lived and he had an intuition: only a woman living a total devotion to Christ in the religious life can enter those houses and take care of the needs that she may find, from cleaning to prepare food, from care to education.
Little sisters of the Assumption were so founded; they actually invented a modern welfare activity: the home care.
The Congregation spread across Europe and they arrived in Milan where in 1958 the “little sisters” (as they are known in the neighborhoods in which they live and work) met Father Giussani who was impressed by their experience of faith and thus of charity, by the profound harmony between mission and religious life.
Today the Sisters are present in Italy in Milan, Turin, Trieste, Rome, and Naples, and Madrid. In 1993 in Italy they formed the new congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption; there they constitute a social reality that has acquired new dimensions of home care: home based intervention, nursing care, children day care, the educational commitment in the relationship with the school and with the family, the collaboration with the local authority and social services. The purpose of their presence can be summarized by a phrase of Father Pernet: “remaking a people for God”. Starting from the past history, through stories, films and pictures the exhibition tells this overwhelming experience of community and fraternity in the suburbs of our cities nowadays.