We, the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart, an institute of religious women in the Roman Catholic Church, answer the Father's call to personal holiness by living the vowed life in community. We represent a simple, servant church. We strive to respond in a spirit of joy, witnessing as women of peace.   Our vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are made as a response to the God who loved us first. An intensification of the baptismal vows, this profession is a deliberate, religiously binding, solemn promise

made to God to be faithful throughout the journey. Taken only after serious discernment and in full freedom, the vows are a celebration of a way of life that already exists; a celebration of the commitment each woman has grasped to be her very self, to live as God has called her to be.

 

Through our vow of poverty, we accept identification as 'minores' (the poor and the powerless) freeing ourselves for total dependence on our God. We attempt to reject the temptations of a consumer society. We, personally and communally, choose to live our poverty in spirit and in fact, which includes clothing ourselves in simplicity.

 

Through our life of chastity, we pledge a singleheartedness to the God who has first loved us. Held in a love bond, we attest to the fact that God continues to be faithful to the promise to be with us through all the days of our lives. In loving service, we freely give our hearts, but not to another's keeping for the Hand of Love already holds our hearts.

 

Through our vow of obedience, we regularly listen to God's word as it comes to us through the people and events of our daily experiences. We are compelled to maintain a balance of contemplation, community, and ministry in a spirit of simplicity and minority. We try to conform our lives more and more to the Gospel values of poverty, contemplation, minority, and conversion, and to help others to make the Gospel the measure of their own lives.

 

We vow to pursue these Gospel counsels within a community lifestyle, keenly aware that we need the support of one another to be faithful to our commitment. Thus the vows become a bond of love, an invitation to call one another to faithfulness, to be the women God intended us to be. As channels of grace, the vows serve as the melody that allows the loving harmony of God to flow in and through the singer. They mark the beginning of a journey that we sing the remainder of our lives.