210 Father Papczyński… Many confreres, also the oldest ones, emphasized the fact that they established a relationship with Fr. Papczyński—our Founder—for the fi rst time. The confreres of my generation and those close to my age group, used to speak about this situation as if we’ve been raised without a father, that we’ve been hereditary orphans. And that orphans have brought up other orphans. Today, it seems as if we came back to our father, discovered our father or at least began discovering him as a man of fl esh and blood, a man fi lled with the Holy Spirit, through whom the Spirit acted then and is acting in us today. This is very helpful for me and for many others in understanding where we come from and who we are. In short: Father Papczyński has become a father to many of us. Our charism—The Immaculate Conception… I can see that many of us have already discovered or are in the process of discovering the Immaculate Conception as our charism, the center of our spirituality and the point of reference for our life and apostolic activities. I’m not saying that we did not hear about the Immaculate Conception; I’m saying that now we’ve heard about it in a totally new manner, with a totally new force. For the very fi rst time, it was that powerful. It seems that before, we often regarded ourselves as parish or shrine priests, as professors and editors-in-chief, but now we discover that we are of the Immaculate Conception, regardless of what we do, regardless of the offi ces that we fulfi ll. The Immaculate Conception is what defi nes us. This is our hallmark, it marks all of our actions. It seems that many of us felt before as if we were wandering in the fog, without an identity, and consequently, each one obtained his own identity—that of a professor, an editor, a pastor, a catechist, etc. But now a much more profound identity is in the making and it fl ows out of the Immaculate Conception. Pavlo Ostrovskiy, MIC Ukraine, Khmelnickiy, Vicariate Superior I’d like to begin my refl ection about Fr. Founder’s beatifi cation by repeating what’s been already said here: we’ve discovered our father. I think that Fr. Papczyński has never stopped being our father. It was only a question of the extent to which we felt that we were his sons. When in 1992, I came as a student of the diocesan seminary in Riga (Latvia) to the Marian Seminary in Lublin (Poland), students there used to say: “Father Papczyński won’t ever be a saint.” It sounded sad and incomprehensible to me, who found himself in the Marian community for the fi rst time. I thought to myself that our Founder would not be proclaimed a saint as long as the Marians “don’t build a landing pad” for him to “land as a saint” there. Today we rejoice in the fact that this time has come,
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