1. The Origins
With the words “Today a great work begins,” pronounced by Mosén Antonio Claret, gathered with five young priests in a small room of the Seminary of Vic, on July 16, 1849, the life of the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary takes off.
Claret’s initiative was not improvised. For a long time he had been thinking about the convenience, first of all, of preparing priests for the preaching of the Gospel, and then, of getting together with those who were animated “by his own spirit,” to do with them, what he could not do alone. His experience as an itinerant missionary throughout Catalonia and the Canaries had carried him to the conviction that the people needed to be evangelized and that there were not enough priests prepared and zealous for this mission. However, as Claret himself recognized, it was not his own idea, but a divine inspiration that led him to set in motion an enterprise as risky as it was fragile: “how important could it be, since we were so young and so few?” Manuel Vilaró exclaimed, one of the priests gathered in the Seminary of Vic.
