Showing the difference our services are making to people and their lives has always been very important within the Society.  Indeed, over the years, impact from healthcare and other service delivery has been captured very creatively by Medical Mission Sisters.  

Displayed opposite, you can see the very first Christmas card, sent by the Society one hundred years ago at Christmas 1925.

In celebrating its Centenary in 2025, the Society continued its tradition of marking special anniversaries. Fifty years earlier, the Society and its members organised a plethora of events and activities worldwide for the 1975 Golden Jubilee, including Thanksgiving Masses, reunions, receptions and dinners.  Anniversary cards and pamphlets were published; artworks and displays were created. Many took as their theme, ‘So Let Your Light Shine’.

Thanksgiving, celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November, is a public holiday that started out as a harvest festival. It is a celebration of the blessings of the year, when people come together to share a festive family meal, attend Church services and view special sporting events.

Sister Mary Em McGlone was first missioned to Fort Portal, Uganda, where she served as a nurse and midwife and supervisor for six years. Back in the United States of America, she went on to become a practitioner and educator in holistic health, creating the Centre for Human Integration (CHI) in 1981 in Philadelphia, where she served as its director until 2007.  She then moved on to her other passion which is art. 

'InterContinent' was the Society’s internal, central communications bulletin, published between 1968 and 2020 - with a special edition also published in 2022. It evolved from being a simple newsletter intended to keep sisters abreast of progress after the 1967 General Chapter, to becoming a focal part of the Society’s new communications strategy.

In the Medical Missionary magazine in 1965, Sister M. Benet, Mistress of Postulants and Novices in Poona, India, describes how those young women under her charge are “rich in promise” and the following description is given: 

The term “mandala” comes from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, which means “circle.”

As psychoanalyst, CG Jung, wrote: “I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time… Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: … the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well, is harmonious.”

In 2003, the Twelfth General Chapter was held in Nairobi, Kenya - a General Chapter being a time of community discernment and decision-making.  It was the first time such a gathering had been held in Africa. 

As many of you will know, modern day saint, Saint Mother Teresa, came to learn how to care for the sick and the dying at the Society’s Holy Family Hospital in Patna, India, in the 1940s before setting up her own Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta - now usually known as Kolkata.