By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Homily by Archbishop Thomas Wenski at Mass for the perpetual profession of vows of six Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary. St. Mary Cathedral, Miami. Dec. 12, 2025.
We welcome the families and friends along with the bishops and priests gathered here together to witness the profession of final vows of these young women, these religious sisters as Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary. This is a joyful day for them, for their brothers and sisters in religious life, and for all of us. And this day has come only after a long discernment – their own and that of their superiors.
As these young sisters prepare to make their final profession, we are reminded that consecrated life is a gift in and for the Church that makes manifest the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one spouse, Jesus Christ. The consecrated, in one sense them, are the Church concentrated. As vowed religious, you give the entire Christian community a unique witness to the implications of our own baptisms.
Today, December 12, we also honor as the Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mary is the image of the Church whom we should all strive to imitate. And your life’s journey as vowed religious is like that of the Virgen Mary’s own journey, a pilgrimage of faith and consecration.
The evangelical counsels, poverty, chastity, and obedience along with your religious family’s special vow of total Marian availability lived according to the spirit of your rule of life mirror in your own lives Mary’s own “fiat”, her free response to the Lord’s invitation. These vows do not constrain or limit your freedom; the vows make true freedom possible. Poverty frees you from the burdens of possessions; chastity liberates you from slavery to vice, and obedience gives you the freedom to serve. Thus, these vows are not simply renunciations; rather the vows you pronounce today free you to pursue in the world a way of life “where God is the goal, his Word the light, and his will the guide, where consecrated persons move along peacefully in the certainty of being sustained by the hand of a Father who welcomes and provides, where they are accompanied by brothers and sisters, moved by the same Spirit, the Holy Spirit who wants to and knows how to satisfy the desires and longings sown by the Father in the heart of each one.”
The Blessed Mother’s life can be summed up with four words found in the Gospels. The first word, taken from the gospel we have just heard is “Fiat” – May it be done to me according to your word. This is Mary’s “yes” to the proposal God made to her through the Angel Gabriel. A second word is “Magnificat” – “My soul magnifies the Lord” as one translation renders it. “Magnificat” describes then Mary’s response to God’s grace at work in her life. The third word is “Conservabat” – Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart; and a final word, “Stabat”, which describes her standing faithfully at the foot of the cross watching her son die for humanity.
Fiat, Magnificat, Conservabat, Stabat: Mary’s life in a nutshell. These words are also descriptive of the vocation of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts. But since Mary’s Fiat” made her the first disciple or Christian, these words also set forth a pattern for each of us to follow in our lives. We too are called to say “Yes” to God’s plan for our own lives, and our response to that plan lived out concretely in our lives should also magnify the Lord. We too are to keep the Word alive in our hearts, mediating on the things that God has done for us, and to stand with Christ, especially to stand with him in he poor , the suffering, the persecuted.
Thank you, sisters, for your generous response to the Lord’s call to consecrated life. As consecrated religious sisters, you seek to magnify the “characteristic features of Jesus, the chaste, poor, obedient one” and make them through your lives constantly visible in the midst of the world. By responding courageously to your vocation – and through many years of formation – you have allowed the Lod to work “on you” and “in you”. May the Lord continue to work “through you” for his greater glory and honor and for the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
