Golden Jubilee of Sr Susan Flood

25/08/2022

On Saturday, 20 August 2022 a long awaited celebration took place. We celebrated the Jubilee of 50 years of religious life of Sr Susan Flood, our Prioress General.

Present at the celebration were our communities in the Generalate, invited guests, the Provincial Prioresses invited to a meeting to take place in the following week, and the Sacred Heart priests who celebrate Mass for us.

The Gospel chosen for the celebration of Sr Sue’s Golden Jubilee was the story of the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus at the well. In the homily, Sr Sue and Fr Chris Chaplin MSC, the celebrant, shared some of their reflections on this passage.

Sr Sue spoke of what this text had meant to her at different moments of her life. One of the points of her reflection at this time was that in the encounter with Jesus the Samaritan woman learns to know herself as well as to know Jesus, as we also learn to know ourselves when we meet Jesus.
Jesus crosses cultural boundaries in his encounter with the woman, a Samaritan, and he too learns more of his mission as Messiah.
The woman meets Jesus and she also receives a mission which she begins by bringing her neighbours to Jesus. Our encounters with Jesus give us too a mission to make him known.

After the Eucharist, we continued our celebration together over lunch. Towards the end of our meal we watched a video of the greetings sent by the Ursuline Provinces from all over the world. In this way, our celebration reached out to the whole Ursuline world.

We thank God for the gift of this Jubilee and for the gift of Sr Susan to the Ursulines of the Roman Union. We thank her for having undertaken her mission and for her “encounter with God that has led, and will continue to point other people to their own deep encounter with God, and to know how deeply gifted they are” (Sr Susan’s words).