According to Lavigerie, Mission is the fruit of prayerful contemplation. There is no mission without prayer. In prayer, missionaries listen to the Word of God and welcome it in contemplation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, which attracts them and associates them to His plan of love for humankind.

Thus, Lavigerian spirituality as received through the teachings of Lavigerie can be summed up in six points:

1. Contemplation of the Triune God who desires the good of all his children and of all creation.
2. Strong and ardent attachment to Jesus-Christ.
3. A continual desire for holiness.
4. A sense of sacrifice.
5. Devotion to Mary Our Lady of Africa.
6. Ignatian discernment.

Communion with the Triune God: God of ALL

According to Lavigerie, the special aspect that characterises the typical missionary vocation is the little word “ALL”. “In prayer and in daily listening to the Word of God, the missionary discovers the universality of God’s plan of the redemption of all people through Jesus Christ.” (Sr Frieda Avonts, MSOLA, in Le charisme des Soeurs Missionnaires de Notre Dame d’Afrique, 1978, pp. 22-23).

The God contemplated by the missionary is “the God of all”. As Father, he wants the salvation of all mankind. His incarnate Son, Jesus, died and rose for all. The Holy Spirit fills the universe (“poured out on all flesh”) and reaches out to each person wherever they are, touching them and leading them to Christ, and with Him, in Him, to the Father who loves all His children and wants everyone to be happy: “Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature… to everyone without exception…”.

The missionary is either a contemplative or nothing. When they embark on apostolic action, they will not become ‘contemplatives minus something’, but ‘contemplatives plus something’. The missionary, Lavigerie says, must not only “sanctify himself/herself” (…) but also “sanctify others”, i.e. become an “overflowing”, radiant contemplative, who remains contemplative unless he/she ceases to be a missionary. The gaze remains fixed on the Father of all, Jesus, Saviour of all, and the Spirit who distributes divine gifts to all.

In this way, the missionary humbly enters a Mission that is not primarily his or her own but rather enters into a Mission which is that of the Father, and of the Son who is sent, and of the Holy Spirit who continues the Son’s work in the apostles and in the Church.

“Strong and ardent attachment to Our Lord”

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the One to whom we missionaries are attached by a love that Lavigerie often describes as “strong and ardent”.

“Growing in love with Our Lord” is a daily program for us, as is ‘walking in his footsteps’. We offer Him our sorrows; we turn to Him in our difficulties. Our task is to preach Jesus Christ by word and witness. We adore him in the Eucharist and receive him in the communion that assimilates us to him. We strive to “conform our lives to his” “according to the spirit of the Gospel”.

The desire to be more holy

Lavigerie once told one of his close friends before his death that he wanted nothing from his missionaries but their progress in holiness. The word progress is important: the holiness Lavigerie wanted and desired for his missionaries is an extension of their baptismal holiness (the Magis of our baptism): every Christian, by virtue of baptismal grace, is already clothed in holiness. For Lavigerie, missionary work can only be accomplished by saints. The apostolic life, which is more arduous than the religious life (so Lavigerie thought), must be holier (I.237). He also said to the future Mother Marie Claver: “For such a great and difficult work (by which he meant the Mission), you need perfect instruments, truly apostolic souls, saints (…) If you are not a saint, you will be nothing”. To the Fathers of the second caravan, he expressed the same thing in other terms: ”The Fathers will remember that example is the most eloquent [form of] preaching. These recommendations were echoed a century later by Pope John Paul II in Redemptoris Missio: “a true missionary is a saint” (no. 90).

Therefore, at the heart of Lavigerian missionary spirituality, there is the desire to live in constant union with God, to be perfect (Mt 5:48) and merciful like Him (Lk 6:36), to look upon each person with respect, compassion and love, as God Himself looks upon His creation.

  ”Visum pro martyrio”: accepting to suffer for God and for the people

In his instructions to his missionaries, Lavigerie often returned to the theme of martyrdom: “Give me saints, I’ll make martyrs of them”, he asked the first novice master. It’s not a question of the missionary “playing the martyr” or thinking only of extreme cases of suffering in the Mission, even if the Gospel in many places warns us that murderous persecutions are part of the normal Christian condition and that sometimes because of our fidelity to Christ our faith commits us to accept death rather than deny the faith.

According to Lavigerie, the “mystique of martyrdom” is first and foremost a call to bear witness to Jesus Christ before human beings, to whom we make known in word and deed what we have seen, heard and touched, i.e. the Word of God made flesh in our lives. To make known is to make visible, to show, and even to publish the hope that dwells within us, even to the point of sometimes contradicting the spirit of the world and being misunderstood or even rejected.

The “mystique of martyrdom” also consists of living as if our lives were already given to God and others. It means wanting to live like Christ, the Servant par excellence, always emptying himself (kenosis), and giving his life for the multitude. Nothing expresses this spiritual experience of the missionary better than this extract from the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer:

“And that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and rose again for us, he sent the Holy Spirit from you, Father, as the first fruits for those who believe. So that, bringing to perfection his work in the world, he might sanctify creation to the full.”

Our Lady Queen of Africa

How can we love the Son without loving the Mother? Devotion to Mary is one of the essential elements of our spiritual life.

By her unconditional ‘yes’, Mary not only gave birth to Jesus in the mystery of Incarnation. She continues to give birth to him every day in the souls of the faithful. The aim of devotion to Mary is to make missionaries, in imitation of Mary, faithful disciples of Jesus, as zealous in communicating the divine life as they are in living it to the full.

Cardinal Lavigerie was always convinced that he had never been able to do any good except through the intercession of Mary and that his missionaries would never do any good except through her help. Therefore, he ordered a prayer to Our Lady of Africa to be recited daily.

He was particularly fond of the title ’Our Lady of Africa’. It was to this Queen of Africa that he entrusted the Missionary Sisters. It was Mary, the Immaculate Conception, under the title of Our Lady of the Missions of Africa, whom he gave to his missionary family as their patroness. 8 December is the day on which we solemnly celebrate our consecration to Mary.

Faithful to their Mission of building bridges between peoples, cultures and religions, the missionaries of Cardinal Lavigerie also have a great devotion to Our Lady of Africa, whose basilica is in Algiers. In the document addressed to Cardinal Lavigerie on 8 June 1875, on the occasion of the consecration of this basilica, Pope Pius IX invited the faithful who visit this shrine to pray ’for the concord of peoples, states and religions, the conversion of sinners and the sanctification of the Church’.

Lavigerie saw the establishment of the Society in Jerusalem as a favour granted by Providence, without any human effort having been made to obtain it. He saw it as a consecration and union between Mary and her children.

Cardinal Lavigerie, who always carried a statuette of St Joseph in his pocket, also invited us to pray with confidence to this foster father of Jesus. “Let us turn to him in all our spiritual and material needs”, he said.

Ignatian discernment  

Trained in Ignatian spirituality, we seek to discern God’s will for us daily. We seek the right way to behave before God and among people in a specific situation. Attentive to the movements of the soul, with an indifference that does not seek our own will, we choose the path, whether joyful or painful, that will always lead us towards what is best.

To help us do this, we are given several means. First of all, there is the evening review of the day, the most important spiritual moment in the life of a missionary, which allows us to see where God has been present in our day and where he has been neglected. There is also daily meditation, monthly recollection and annual retreat.

For Cardinal Lavigerie, the special grace of the annual retreat – eight days in silence – was spiritual renewal. Given the many activities we are engaged in, our daily recollections are not always carried out in the best conditions. This can lead to lukewarmness and slackness. The retreat is there to pull us back together and shake off the weariness in us. ‘Remember the greatness of your vocation, the good you are called to do…’