From the Holy Spirit Don Luigi Guanella was endowed with a filial and merciful heart, capable of feeling God as "Abba - Father", who, rich in goodness and providence, wants to make all men a single family.
The riches of the Heart of Christ were opened to him, so as to feel it as the whole of his life: brother, friend, redeemer.
He drew extraordinary sensitivity in seeing, understanding and helping man in his need to see the face of Christ in him. The Spirit also shares the grace and evangelical inspiration of the Founder in the Church to continue his ministry of charity. In union with Jesus the Good Shepherd and the compassionate Samaritan, our Founder, although eager to help and save everyone, loved in particular the most abandoned and suffering, he did his utmost to give them "Bread and Lord". Like him we are sent to evangelize the poor, revealing to them the love of the Father and giving them reasons for hope. We therefore make ourselves instruments of Providence through the exercise of works of mercy and the ministry of pastoral charity. Among the most tried in body and spirit and without human support, we take care of children, the elderly and "good children" as people who qualify our apostolate.
The charity of Christ has drawn us to form a community of brothers who, in total self-giving to God and neighbor, intend to carry out the Founder's project. United by a special bond of charity, as members of the same family, Clerics and Brothers, we lead a common life and follow Christ with the public profession of the evangelical counsels. We are in the Church a religious institute, dedicated to the works of the apostolate, clerical and of pontifical right, divided into houses and provinces, under the guidance of the superior general, animator and guardian of fidelity to the original charism. Like every Christian community, we are God's people, abode of the Spirit, a chosen race, a royal priesthood. The divine call places us at the heart of the Church and, making us more deeply involved in her mission in the world and, in particular, in her commitment to the poor.
In the Church we must bear witness to the paternal goodness of God and to the sacred value of every man, even the least gifted, according to the Lord's commandment: "Love one another as I have loved you".
Because we have believed in God's love for the world, we share the joys, sadnesses and hopes of the men of our time. “A Christian heart that believes and feels cannot go before the needs of the poor without helping them” said the Founder. Attentive to the signs of the times and in collaboration with men of good will, we work to defend the least so that no one is neglected in life and we work to build a just world open to Christ and his Gospel.
Our whole experience of faith and service has charity as its center, lived in filial abandonment to God and in evangelical mercy towards the poor. This spirit is for us the most precious legacy left to us by the Founder: it gives a precise physiognomy to the Institute and the specific character of our presence in the Church. Reached without merit by God's mercy, we strive to make it visible in us by becoming merciful in our turn and bearing witness to lively faith in Providence which dresses the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air. The family spirit, always inculcated by the Founder, makes us live as one big House of Providence. In the family of Nazareth he showed us the exemplary image of family life, wholly centered in the person of Jesus and characterized by simplicity, trust and complete availability to the will of the Father. To strengthen the bonds of fraternity and love, he traced for us in the "preventive method" a path rich in spirituality which leads us, in imitation of God's goodness, to surround our brothers with kindness and solicitude with an assiduous presence, distancing from them the evil and favoring their good.
“To pray and suffer” is the program indicated to us by the Founder who thus expressed the fundamental conditions for the effectiveness and holiness of the Congregation.
