On Saturday, October 8, 2011, Most Rev. Gonzalo Gracía de Cortázar, bishop of Valparaíso, celebrated Mass in the parish church of Our Lady of Lourdes founded by the Assumptionists in 1911.

The Assumptionists arrived in this port city in February 1911, led by Fr. Gunfrid Darbois (brother of the first president of Assumption College, Fr. Thomas Darbois), and settled into the neighborhood known as Cerro de los Placeres which, at the time, had a small population  that had just begun to return because of the huge earthquake that occurred in 1906.

As it is every year, the feast of our three Assumptionist  Bulgarian martyrs is an opportunity to stop to reflect on the heritage that they have left not only to us who are called to work today in the Mission in Eastern Europe, but to every brother and sister of our Assumption Family and the Church at large.

Keeping alive their memory means rendering present among us these brothers whom the Church, by means of their beatification, considers to be a gift for all of Christianity. Praying to them, invoking their intercession, allows us to receive the spiritual support we need to make Christ alive in us and around us.

Some Initial Reflections

By Fr. Jean-Paul Sagadou, AA, superior

The Assumptionists  in Ouagadougou staying with the Religious Sisters  of the Assumption

Some years ago the Religious of the Assumption help us get settled in Togo giving us living space in one of their houses in Sokode and where one of our two communities still lives today. Here in Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, it is they again who have rented us space in a building that they recently vacated in order to take up residence in another neighborhood of the city closer to their work.

This past summer Fr. Vincent Leclercq, who recently completed a doctorate in theology at Boston College and who currently teaches at the Catholic Institute of Lille, made a presentation on education at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. Why this school? Quite simply because Emmanuel d'Alzon, the founder of the Assumptionists,  atttended classes there from 1824-1828 and it was there that he began to reflect on the kind of education that individuals must receive to be transformed themselves and to transform society.