|
Clare Pratt, RSCJ, superior general, is seated, front right, next to
Jane Maltby, RSCJ, of England. Standing, from left, are Son In Sook
of Korea, Maria Dolores Gorriz of Spain and Marisa Sacerdote of
Argentina. Sister Pratt is from the United States.
On February 7, Clare Pratt, RSCJ, the first American to serve as superior-general of the international Society of the Sacred Heart, will begin a six-week-long official visit to Religious of the Sacred Heart in the U.S. Province. She will be accompanied by Jane Maltby, RSCJ.
Sister Maltby is one of five members of the Society, including Sister Pratt, who serve on the Society’s international leadership team, based in Rome.
Sisters Pratt and Maltby will travel with members of the U.S. Province leadership team to cities around the country, meeting with Religious of the Sacred Heart and visiting some of their ministries. They will also meet with Sacred Heart associates, alumnae, co-workers and friends.
Sister Pratt, one of ten American women presently serving in Rome as superiors general of their respective religious orders, is the fifteenth woman to serve in the Society’s top leadership post since its founding in France more than two centuries years ago. She grew up in Washington D.C., the eldest of five children of U.S. District Judge John Helm Pratt and Bernice Safford Pratt, and attended Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Newton, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree in religious education from La Salle College in Philadelphia.
Sister Pratt has served as a teacher and administrator in Sacred Heart schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Texas and for one year as a substitute teacher in Boston’s public schools.
She served as the Society’s secretary-general in Rome before being elected to her present post.
Sister Pratt’s dream for the Society’s members, expressed in an interview soon after being named superior-general, is “that we be the gift of God to others. Very simply, that we be lovers.”
“There is no doubt in my mind. What we are about is loving,” she said. It would be her wish, she said, that each RSCJ would say, “At the heart of my community I shall be love. At the heart of my ministry, I shall be love. Where I am, I shall be love.”
Sister Maltby grew up in Hove, England, a seaside city on the south coast. She is a former teacher and administrator in Sacred Heart schools. She developed a special interest in children with emotional or behavior problems, prompting her to undertake graduate study in child and adolescent psychotherapy. Before joining the Central Team she worked for ten years with troubled young people and their families and, for five of those years, also served the Society in provincial government. She lived in a multiracial, multicultural area in west London.
Sister Maltby believes that the call to live the Society’s charism of compassionate, transforming love “is not just for ourselves, but for the whole Sacred Heart family. This translates for me into a concern for the integral growth of each person from within.”
Sister Maltby joined two other members of the General Council, Sister Marisa Sacerdote of Argentina, and Sister Son In Sook of Korea, in a visit to the U.S. Province in 2004.
The Society’s General Council oversees some 3,000 Religious of the Sacred Heart in forty-four countries around the world. The superior-general serves an eight-year, non-renewable term.
|
