Consecrated Life Africa’s Sacred Tree: Vatican Prefect Calls Superiors in Africa to Be Bridges of Healing, Hope in 2026

In many African cultures, Sr. Brambilla explains, the sacred tree is more than a metaphor; it is a lived reality of encounter, memory, and reconciliation.

“In some cultures, and spiritual experiences, dialogue with God and with ancestors finds its natural and primary place precisely in the shade of the sacred tree where prayer is celebrated, the ritual of communion between the visible and invisible worlds,” she writes.

Naming this space the Palabre Tree, Sr. Brambilla describes it as “a visual representation of this ‘living place’ where heaven and earth meet, a safe space where conflicts are resolved, broken or lost threads are reconnected.”

In this light, Consecrated Life is called to become such a place for today’s wounded world. The sacred tree, she says, is a site where “balance, connection, and communion can be found within oneself, with others, with creation, and with God.” It is also a bridge – deeply rooted and expansively open.

“The tree serves as a bridge between different dimensions, between heaven and earth, a symbolic yet very concrete bridge,” the first-ever women to head a Vatican Dicastery, who was appointed in January 2025 notes, pointing to its roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit as signs of an integrated and fruitful life.

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Consecrated Life Africa’s Sacred Tree: Vatican Prefect Calls Superiors in Africa to Be Bridges of Healing, Hope in 2026

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COMSAM is a Vatican-endorsed confederation that the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) established in 2005. It brings together Conferences of Major Superiors from across Africa and its islands to support, strengthen, and empower the Consecrated on the continent.

COMSAM works in close partnership with the Vatican Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (ICLSAL), the department of the Roman Curia that is responsible for matters concerning women and men Religious.

COMSAM aims to foster collaboration, provide formation, and encourage mission engagement among ICLSAL across linguistic and cultural boundaries in Africa.

In her New Year 2026 message to COMSAM members, Sr. Brambilla lingers on the healing power traditionally associated with sacred trees. “Often, in sacred trees, true sanctuaries of the people, everything is healing, nourishing, and protecting,” she writes.

The Vatican official adds that the various parts of sacred trees “constitute true resources of therapeutic energy to strengthen and sustain the physical, mental, relational, and spiritual life of individuals and the community.”

From this flows a challenging question for Religious Life today: “From which of ‘sacred trees’ do we draw strength and support along our journey? How can Consecrated Life become a ‘sacred tree’ along the pilgrimage of our brothers and sisters?”

Answering this call, the Vatican Prefect urges members of ICLSAL in Africa and Madagascar to cultivate both memory and renewal. “It seems important to me that Consecrated Life create spaces and paths to cultivate both the roots and the shoots of the tree,” she writes.

These include “spaces and paths of graceful memory,” where the history, charism, luminous witnesses, struggles, and sufferings of each institute are revisited and honoured. Such remembrance, she insists, enables roots “to sink ever deeper into the healthy soil of the charism,” so that Consecrated Life may be nourished by “ever new and fresh sap” and give rise to “new shoots that spread the oxygen the world needs today.”

“Happy New Year!” Sr. Brambilla says, leaving COMSAM members with a vision of Consecrated Life as Africa’s sacred tree: deeply rooted, generously sheltering, quietly healing, and abundantly life-giving for the Church and the world in 2026.

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