It’s Not Time to Sleep!

“Charity Crossed the Seas”

Montevideo, March 29, 2026.

This account seeks to bridge the gap between the heroic past and the challenging present, so that the seed of vigilant evangelical charity sown in the Americas 170 years ago may continue to bear fruit in hearts, communities, and works.

Saint Anthony Mary Gianelli envisioned a women’s institute distinguished by its active and sacrificial charity, a radical poverty lived with joy and trust in Providence, and a universal, open mission beyond geographical and cultural boundaries. In his vision, the Daughters of Mary Most Holy of the Garden were to be “ready to respond wherever need calls. Always and everywhere.” In this way, he prepared the heart of the Institute to respond to calls from afar, such as the one that would arrive from Montevideo a few years after his death.

In 1855, the Charity Hospital of Montevideo needed religious leadership. The Auxiliary Commission, chaired by Francisco Vidal and Juan Ramón Gómez, entrusted Father Isidoro Fernández with the task of finding four Sisters of Charity in Europe. For two years, Father Fernández received rejections due to the political instability and the wars in the Río de la Plata region. Shortly before returning, in Genoa, Canon Magnasco suggested the Gianellinas.

Upon finding Sister Clara in Genoa, he interviewed her, explaining the nature of the request entrusted to him from Uruguay. Mother Clara’s heart opened, and she accepted the proposal, conditional upon the Mother Superior’s consent. She hurried to Chiavari, arriving at night and ringing the bell, but no one answered; the entire community was asleep. Then Mother Clara stood beneath a window and, with indescribable enthusiasm and overflowing joy, uttered a cry that would remain in the memory of the Institute: “Sisters, it is not time to sleep, America awaits us!” Upon hearing Mother Clara’s voice, they rose immediately and that very night answered yes. In 48 hours, they prepared for the journey. This “yes” fulfilled the prophecy of Saint Anthony Gianelli: “With poverty as their escort and guide, they will cross the seas.”

The 19th century in the Río de la Plata region offered precisely a scenario of great need, fertile ground for embodying vigilant evangelical charity: civil wars and international conflicts, recurring epidemics, extreme poverty, orphanhood, and precarious healthcare. Tensions between Church and State were also growing.

In this context, the arrival of the Sisters of the Garden in Montevideo on November 18, 1856, after a three-month journey marked by various adversities, was like casting an anchor of hope into a turbulent sea. These first eight apostles of our Institute in America, under the guidance of Mother Clara, with a heart inflamed with passion for Christ and an untiring dedication, made our charism fruitful by serving the most vulnerable in the fields of health, education and social solidarity.

Indeed, the first years of the sisters’ mission in America consisted of “being where others could not or would not”: field hospitals, orphanages and hospitals for the infectious disease sufferers, remote cities, battlefields, and contexts of aggressive secularism. Their testimonies of charity made concrete, of maternal perseverance in the face of suffering, of tenderness and strength in caring for nascent life, of gentle words and looks of faith in the face of fear and the proximity of death—in short, of prompt responses, in the manner of the Virgin Mary, to emerging needs—awakened admiration and gratitude among various leaders, government officials, and the people, causing the fire of Vigilant Evangelical Charity to spread, according to God’s timing, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Bolivia, and from these lands to the Holy Land and Spain.

As we joyfully celebrate these 170 years of Gianellian presence in America, let us feel a profound gratitude reborn in our hearts for these eight Italian heroines, for their “yes” to God’s plan allows us today to be protagonists of this beautiful story. Let us contemplate their legacy with grateful memory; let us recognize in it a mark made of patient love, silent dedication, and concrete faith. A mark that awakened religious vocations in countless young American women and that shaped the lives of many lay people. A charismatic experience that also deeply touches the life and mission of all of us today and continues to inspire us to educate, care for, and accompany life with the same spirit: with firm tenderness, with an attentive gaze, and with a heart always ready to love.

Let us bear passionate witness that the Gianellian charism is a living flame that does not go out, that it is alive today, in those of us who, with the same missionary zeal as those who came before us, approach the new peripheries, embodying vigilant evangelical charity, keeping deep in our hearts the echo of that voice that awakened the Congregation and that continues to give new life to our charism: it is not time to sleep!