My Minivan Is My.....?

Last week Pope Francis presided over a Mass to mark the end of the Year for Consecrated Life.  Robert Mickens reported here that the Holy Father also gave a short talk to men and women religious at an audience prior to the Mass.  “Why has the womb of religious life become so sterile?” he asked.  

The answers to that question are complex and manifold.  A small share of an answer may be linked to how many of our parishes and dioceses chose to celebrate the Year itself.  For the most part, it was seen as an opportunity to say a much deserved word of thanks to men and women religious for their service and their lives of witness.  Those words, while sincere, often had the tone of an elegy, an acknowledgment that many religious communities may have reached the point of irreversible decline.

What I generally did not hear from the pulpit or the episcopal chair was any sustained argument aimed at the Catholic laity for why religious life--a life dedicated to the “perfection of charity” through the practice of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience--remains integral to Christian witness in the modern world.   This way of life, rooted in the example of Jesus himself, has been part of the Church from the very beginning.  To use an overworked metaphor, a Church without communities committed to the practice of the counsels is a Church breathing with only one lung.

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