Community Day of Thanksgiving - January 7, 2025
Sisters of Peace Register of Receptions and Professions for the first sisters and those that followed.
Message from the Congregation Leadership Team
For what do we give thanks?
We remember and give thanks each year on January 7th - the day in 1884 in Nottingham Cathedral that Sisters Evangelista Gaffney and Mary Rose Kelly, with extreme confidence and driven by the Spirit, professed vows in a Congregation which did not yet exist. Later that same month Sisters Joseph Byrne and Austin Moore professed their first vows in Grimsby, the first mission of the Institute.
We remember and give thanks that on May 18th of that year, Margaret Anna met with Pope Leo XIII who personally released her from her vows as a Poor Clare and received her vows as a Sister of Peace, thus affirming the creation of this new Congregation saying: “I bless you, I bless your order, the Sisters of Peace. God will bless and prosper it. I bless your sisters present and to come.”
Truly we give thanks for these audacious, trusting and faith-filled sisters who so generously responded to the Spirit’s call to secure divine peace. As Bishop Bagshawe said at their profession: “…our Divine Lord is called the Prince of Peace…To secure this divine peace for ourselves, and to procure its blessings for (others) in the midst of the sin and strife and turmoil and restless anxiety of this modern world, is the object of your institute”.
We remember and give thanks for all our sisters and associates who in these 141 years have continued to be peace, joy and hope to a world that has changed so much and yet struggles with the same injustices of 1884 – war, violence, poverty, discrimination, racism, inequities of all kinds and above all a world caught up in individualism, greed and self-sufficiency – a world crying for the Good News of Jesus Christ!
And how do we give thanks? In his 2025 World Day of Peace Message Pope Francis states:
“May we seek the true peace that is granted by God to hearts disarmed: hearts not set on calculating what is mine and what is yours; hearts that turn selfishness into readiness to reach out to others; hearts that see themselves as indebted to God and thus prepared to forgive the debts that oppress others; hearts that replace anxiety about the future with the hope that every individual can be a resource for the building of a better world. Peace does not only come with the end of wars but with the dawn of a new world, a world in which we realize that we are different, closer and more fraternal than we ever thought possible.”
As we live our thanksgiving, may we, as our founding sisters were, be courageous, passionate and Spirit-filled people of Peace. “United with (Christ) we engage in the struggle against the reality of evil and continue the work of establishing God’s reign of justice and peace.” (Constitution 2)