MESSAGE OF THE WOMEN TO THE CHURCH

Today we turn to you, beloved Church, whose daughters and friends we are, because we consider ourselves to be a conscious part of your tradition of love. And in this awareness, our remembering is grounded, strong and necessary today as ever.

The memory that we have chosen to remember has no rigidity. Nor boundaries: women are everywhere, and we want to remember them in all times and ways. Ours will be a memory of many forms, just like we are many and have been many, within and outside of your fold.

We remember the faith of women, but we also keep as ours their rejection; we will remember their nostalgia, but we will not forget their indignation; we will be the memory of their passion for life, but we will not leave behind us their pain and how it was brought about.

This is the memory of the old ones, those who were there before and saw, who understood and remembered, fought and supported, and who often had to distinguish what to question and what to protect for who would come later. But in the palms of our hands is also the memory of the young ones, the precious gift of the continuity of sisterhood that reaches across the generations and belongs to all, even those who think they are alone, only daughters of their own history.

Our memory is that of faithful women and their testimony as it passed through silence and through words, when they could pronounce them. Their faith has created us, and their choices have confirmed us. But today we decide to remember also the memory of other women, those who do not believe, who have walked next to us for years, although we could never look at each other and recognise each other as sisters. We share this memory of having lived in the same present and to have made it fruitful together.

Our memory will be ecclesial, because it is inclusive and plural like the Spirit who called us to be in you, beloved Church. May it be the memory of thousands and thousands of names and faces, voices and hands, gazes and bodies, so that with women, with all women it may be like with the birds of the sky: not a gesture, not a word or a blink will be lost or unnecessary.

Ours will be a theological memory because it is nourished by our questions and by our common effort to keep them alive, to find ways to pronounce them ever more decidedly each time silence tries to impose itself. This, too, means being a theologian, and we will be it, as Christians and as women. Our memory in this present will be sanctuary and seed: it will watch over the past that we have been, and will sprout

the future that we want to be, without leaving behind no woman. We will not forget anymore, nor will we let forget.