Our Congregation was born at the end of the XIX century in Sicily then pierced by bloody rebellion.
The bourgeoisie class could not bear the submission to the politics of Naples and the sicilian loss of their independence with the parliament and the capital city.
Both the craftsmen and the peasants were panting for better conditions and for several reasons their anger was flowing in violent revolution. The last one was in 1848.
The Bubonic restoration brought about an apparent peace. The people and the clergy, who were protagonists of the unification of Sicily with Italy, were disappointed.
The liberal state was controlled by masons, anticlericals, capitalists and feudatories and soon they had shown their antireligious faces. Against the Religious and Priests started a disparaging criticism campaign, then the protestant onset and the priority of the public order over social justice that brought about division between the state and the people.
In that social context was born our Congregation. Mother Carmela said: “The Institute of the Sacred Heart of the Incarnate Word arises among the darkness and error to revive in the Church the merry face of the truth”.
The young founder with the help of a diocesan priest Don Emmanuele Calì and the authorization of the Palermo’s Archbishop, Cardinal Michelangelo Celesia, started the foundation followed by 4 girls, on September 14, 1884 and soon from Sicily get to Rome and Calabria. On 1951 the first missionaries went to Brazil, to Argentina and Canada on 1981, to Mexico on 2001 and to Palestine on 2010.