Radical and Free: Musings on the Religious Life

By Brian O'Leary

This book is the result of two preached retreats I gave to mark the recent Year of Consecrated Life (2015). However, the origin of the material goes much further back, drawing on my teaching experience both at Manresa Centre of Spirituality and at Milltown Institute (covering a period of thirty years). In both places I had taught courses on religious life – its history, theology, and most of all its underlying spirituality. Indeed, I have always used history and theology (and other disciplines such as psychology and anthropology) in service of exploring and renewing the spirituality of religious life. Another way of saying this is that I am above all interested in values (as appreciated, appropriated, and articulated). This lies behind my decision to structure the talks (now the book) almost entirely around the vows. After an initial chapter on the origins of religious life, I devote two chapters each to poverty, chastity, and obedience. My emphasis is not on the vows as such (dealing with questions that Canon Law might raise) but on the motivating values that the vows express. Only these values can explain why people enter and flourish in religious life. All religious, without distinction, are called to be “radical and free”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: May 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788121811

Brian O'Leary

A publishing veteran with 25 years of operational, management and consulting experience, Brian O'Leary is founder and principal of Magellan Media, a management consulting firm that works with publishers seeking support in content operations, benchmarking and financial analysis. With Hugh McGuire, he co-edited "Book: A Futurists' Manifesto, published in three parts by O'Reilly Media. O'Leary blogs about a variety of issues related to book, magazine and association publishing on his firm's web site, www.magellanmediapartners.com.

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Prologue

The Pope Francis Factor

Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of Consecrated Life in an Apostolic Letter dated 21 November 2014.¹ It was to begin on the First Sunday of Advent that year and conclude on the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, 2 February 2016. This particular time was chosen because it was the fiftieth anniversary of two key documents from Vatican II – that on the Church (Lumen Gentium) and that on the up-to-date renewal of religious life (Perfectae Caritatis). Francis clearly wanted the Year of Consecrated Life to be an ecclesial event. He stressed this, saying, ‘The Year of Consecrated Life concerns not only consecrated persons, but the entire Church’. All the People of God were called to celebrate the existence among them of those men and women living one or other of the various forms of consecrated life.

Of the many initiatives undertaken by Pope Francis this was one of the least spectacular, perhaps even one of the least effective. It did not grab people’s imagination or spark their enthusiasm to any great extent. Compared with the current Year of Mercy it was low-key, if not almost ‘under the radar’. Reasons for this outcome are not difficult to find. In the western world (the main context for these reflections) consecrated life is in a condition of serious diminishment. Its image (and reality) is currently one of ageing men and women, increasingly fragile, overburdened with responsibilities, coping heroically in an increasingly secular culture that no longer understands the rationale of their lives. They have become isolated and peripheral to a society in which they had formerly been fully integrated and hugely esteemed.

The miracle (I use the word deliberately) is that so many of these women and men remain people of deep faith and undiluted hope. In the midst of their struggles they have taken to heart the Lord’s words to the apostle Paul: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness’. (2 Cor 12:9) Their witness is indispensable for their fellow Christians today because the Church too is suffering diminishment in its personnel, status and influence. The consecrated life has thus become a benchmark or point of reference for the experience of the People of God as a whole. Far from becoming irrelevant, the consecrated life is assuming a new and unexpected role in the Church simply by accepting and enduring its present-day passion with serenity – even with joy.

We are well accustomed to recognising the centrality of joy in the teaching of Pope Francis, ever since his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (the joy of the gospel). Consequently it is not surprising that he speaks again of joy in his Apostolic Letter proclaiming the Year of Consecrated Life.

That old saying will always be true, ‘Where there are religious, there is joy.’ We are called to know and show that God is able to fill our hearts to the brim with happiness; that we need not seek our happiness elsewhere; that the authentic fraternity found in our communities increases our joy; and that our total self-giving in service to the church, to families and young people, to the elderly and the poor, brings us life-long personal fulfilment. None of us should be dour, discontented and dissatisfied, for ‘a gloomy disciple is a disciple of gloom’. (II.1)

But Francis is no sentimental dreamer. He is well aware of the difficult circumstances in which the consecrated life has to be lived today.

Like everyone else, we have our troubles, our dark nights of the soul, our disappointments and infirmities, our experience of slowing down as we grow older. But in all these things we should be able to discover ‘perfect joy’. For it is here that we learn to recognise the face of Christ, who became like us in all things, and to rejoice in the knowledge that we are being conformed to him who, out of love of us, did not refuse the sufferings of the cross.

Genesis of this Book

As ways to mark the Year of Consecrated Life I was invited to offer two preached retreats in 2015. The first, of eight days, took place at Loreto Centre in Llandudno, while the second, over four days, was hosted by Manresa House, the Jesuit Centre of Spirituality in Dublin. The talks that I gave on these two occasions form the basis for this book. In preparing them I incorporated material harvested in teaching a course on consecrated life over a period of 30 years at the Milltown Institute. However, I did not regard my retreat presentations at Loreto and Manresa as lectures in an academic sense. Retreat talks are aimed at leading listeners into personal reflection and prayer. They are meant to be evocative and suggestive rather than didactic and systematic. On the other hand, I did not want to offer purely devotional material without any intellectual substance behind it. Our minds, as well as our hearts, play their part in our spiritual lives. The result is a series of considerations or ‘musings’ (see the book’s sub-title) that aimed at being prayerful but that drew on the wisdom of the Bible, insights from the history of consecrated life, and suitable theological reflections.

In readying these talks for publication in book format, most of the changes I made relate to matters of style (such as eliminating expressions that were overly conversational). The substance of the talks has remained intact, although amended wherever that seemed necessary. I have also given references to works from which I quote, and added occasional footnotes of my own. But I have kept these to a minimum. However, there is one specific change in terminology which I need to explain briefly.

Consecrated Life and Religious Life

What Pope Francis promulgated in 2014 was a Year of Consecrated Life. This term, ‘consecrated life’, is relatively new. It was first used in an official Church document in the revised Code of Canon Law (1983) where Part III of Book II, The People of God, has the heading ‘Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life’. In this context ‘consecrated life’ embraces institutes of religious life, secular institutes, hermits or anchorites, and the order of virgins (but not societies of apostolic life). The 1994 Synod of Bishops reflected on the theme ‘The Consecrated Life and its Role in the Church and in the World’, which was followed by Pope St John Paul II’s response and exhortation, Vita Consecrata. All this confirmed the contemporary meaning of the term. Nonetheless, John Paul also included societies of apostolic life in his reflections, showing that the categories found in the Code are not rigid. It is clear that Pope Francis was equally inclusive in his use of the term.

During the two retreats I used the term consecrated life throughout. I was deliberately trying to encourage celebration of the many manifestations of consecrated life, rather than narrowing the focus to religious life alone. however, in this book i have chosen to revert to the more common term. As the Year of Consecrated Life is over, I no longer feel obliged to keep reminding readers of the fuller diversity that exists in the Church. I am certainly not denying its reality or underestimating its richness. However, women and men committed to the religious life constitute by far the most numerous exponents of the consecrated life, making it also the most readily recognisable. This book is primarily about them, their motivations and their values. Furthermore, I discovered that linguistically the term religious life was easier to use, for the simple reason that ‘religious’ can serve as a noun (singular and plural) as well as an adjective. There is no corresponding noun to describe someone in the (wider) consecrated life. In my presentations I had found myself straining to find ways of referring to such a person, using roundabout phrases but with clumsy results.

Plan of the Book

After an opening chapter on the origins of religious life, the rest of the book is built around the three traditional vows (poverty, chastity, obedience). Each is given two chapters. This may seem to some an overly conventional or predictable way of presenting religious life today. However, I have discovered that probing the meaning of the vows not only uncovers the deeper significance (often hidden) of religious life, but constitutes a surprisingly comprehensive methodology. What concerns me throughout are values rather than structures.