Our Charism

The charism of the Sons of Divine Providence is charity without borders towards the poorest: the young, the elderly, the sick, persons with disabilities. St. Luigi Orione put it in a phrase that is easier to say than to live: we must know how to see and feel Christ in man.

That is a demanding claim. It means the person in front of us is not a case to be managed but a presence to be received. It changes how a centre is designed, how a parish decides its priorities, how a farm pays its workers.

To the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Congregation adds a fourth vow: faithfulness to the Pope. It is our way of saying that charity is not a private enterprise: it belongs to the Church, and it is exercised with the Church.

“Only Charity will save the world.” Not charity as sentiment, and not as a substitute for justice — charity as the concrete decision to bind yourself to someone else’s life.

“Youth are the sun or the storm of tomorrow.” A society is not judged by what it says about its young people but by what it prepares for them. In Kenya, where the majority is young, this sentence is not poetry; it is a work plan.

“Gettiamoci nel fuoco dei tempi nuovi” — Let us throw ourselves into the fire of the new times. Don Orione did not want disciples who mourned the past. New times bring new poverties and new tools; the charism is asked to walk into both.

Children and youth with disabilities

In much of the country a disability is still read as a curse, and children are hidden. Our two Orione Community Training Centres, at Kaburugi and Kandisi, exist to contradict that reading with facts: individualised education, physiotherapy, occupational and speech therapy, multisensory rooms, feeding programmes — and a bus that goes and finds the child.

Work that restores dignity

Charity that stops at the plate of food is unfinished. At Kandisi, students over sixteen train for two years on the centre’s irrigated farm and are then employed with a contract and their own bank account. At Nyadorera the farming project employs local people and supplies markets. At Isineti, Maasai women learn kitchen gardens and water management. The aim is always the same: that a person should be able to stand.

Schools

Nursery schools at Kandisi and Kaburugi, the parish primary school at Kairi, St. Rose of Lima Academy at Nyadorera — which began under a tree. Education is how a charism speaks to the future.

Health

The San Luigi Orione dispensary at Kandisi, the Orione Mission Afya Care Centre at Gaitu, the healthcare centre at Sholinke. As one parishioner in Meru said of the fathers: they do not care only for the spirit but also for the body.

Parishes

Five parishes, with their chapels and outstations, where all of this is held together by the Eucharist and the Rosary. The works are not attachments to the parish; they are what the parish means when it says it believes.

If something in this way of living speaks to you, it may not be an accident. Come and see →