Written by Dear Sisters,
Easter finds us again in places both luminous and bruised. We write to you as women to women: with tenderness, without false comfort, and with the quiet trust that light does not abandon the world — even if only through our persistent acts of quiet love.
We are grateful for being here again together. We are grateful for every one of you, scattered across so many countries, languages, and circumstances, yet gathered in this one unbroken belonging.
We Stand at the Foot of the Cross — Again
We cannot write an Easter letter this year without pausing here, in this heavy place.
War in Ukraine has not ended. It has settled into a long, grinding wound at the edge of Europe — one that exhausts the attention of the world even as it continues to claim lives, homes, childhoods, futures. The genocide of Palestinians continues, in plain sight, before the eyes of the international community. Massive strikes on Iranian cities, cultural sites, hospitals. Lebanon, never fully healed from the last war, is at war again: nearly a million people displaced, families evacuated in the night, More than a dozen countries are now drawn into the fire in one way or another. And across the world, the logic of power and violence advances steadily, asking to be normalised, to be accepted as simply the way things are.
We are also forced to painfully acknowledge: much of the violence of our time is entangled with distorted forms of religious faith. The Christianity proclaimed from certain American pulpits. The Judaism drawn upon to justify dispossession. The Sunni and Shia Islam wielded by states and militias. When faith becomes an instrument of political and ideological agendas it becomes its engine. This wound within our own tradition must be looked at honestly, with grief and without self- protection.
There is no quick hope we can offer. But we believe, as those first women believed on that dark Friday, that the last word has not yet been spoken. We did not witness at first hand the joy of the resurrection, but we believe that through the resurrection, that love, when it refuses to abandon the suffering, is already participating in
something that death cannot fully hold.
Medieval Saints of Europe remain an inspiration to our actions
This year we mark the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi. He lived in times that were, in many ways, strikingly like our own. The medieval world around him was turbulent with crusades, with the ambitions of emperors and popes, with territorial wars dressed in the language of God. Cities were rising, commerce was
expanding, and the distance between the powerful and the destitute was growing ever wider. Religious institutions wielded authority that was too often indistinguishable from earthly power. Violence was normalised. Greed was baptised with theological arguments. Indifference had found its comfortable seat at the table of the pious.
And into this world stepped a young man from Assisi who heard, in a crumbling chapel, a voice say: Rebuild my Church. And he did, not on his own – but working hand in hand with brothers and sisters led by Saint Claire — not through armies, not through arguments, but through radical opposition to greed, through joy, through the
willingness to touch the untouchable. Francis recognised that women carried a portion of the work that he simply could not carry — and that without it, something essential would be missing from the body of the Church. The calling for all women remains the same: to bring what only we carry, to go where we are needed and rebuild
faith.
The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church
We are glad to share with you that Synodal Study Group 5 report, dedicated to the participation of women in the life and leadership of the Church, has now been published. We believe it deserves to be read slowly and discussed faithfully. We would dearly like to hear from each of our member organisations: How is this report being received in your country? Is it being discussed — in parishes, in universities, in women’s communities, in ecclesial gatherings? What questions does it open? What resistance does it meet? What hopes does it stir or suppress?
andante is ready to accompany and moderate these conversations — across the varied landscapes of Catholic women’s experience. We do not come with ready answers. We come with readiness to listen, and to carry your reflections forward together.
Come to Walsingham — Our 20th Jubilee
The joy and togetherness that we can still give to each other as andante celebrates its 20th anniversary. We mark this jubilee with a pilgrimage to Walsingham — England’s ancient Marian shrine, a place that has known centuries of prayer, rupture, renewal, and return. We will bring with us the weight of everything we carry this year and we will lay it all, gently, at the feet of the one who also once held a child she could not protect.
We sincerely and warmly invite each of you, and the women of your communities, to join us.
Details for the Walsingham Study Days: https://www.andante-europa.net/
A blessed, holy, and courageous Easter to each of you — to your families, to your communities, to the women you carry in your prayers.
With love and solidarity,
Weronika Felcis, Sophie Rudge, Marleen Peters, Beatrice Ledergerber, Irmtraud Widmayer and Agnieszka Zarzyńska