The Heart of the Mystical Body

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 4, 2005

"What would become of the world if there were no religious?"

That's the question St. Teresa of Avila asked aloud in her 16th century autobiography. It's also the question Pope John Paul II wants us all to reflect upon as we celebrate this Sunday in the U.S. the 9th Day for Consecrated Life.

Pope John Paul II instituted the annual World Day for Consecrated Life in 1997 with three objectives: to praise and thank the Lord more solemnly for the great gift of consecrated life; to promote a knowledge of and esteem for the consecrated life by the entire people of God; and to help consecrated persons, within and across their communities, to acquire a more vivid consciousness of the beauty of their life and their irreplaceable mission in the Church and in the world.

Implicit in all of these objectives is the fact that, in the recent past, the Church and the world — and, frankly, even some religious — have taken the gift of consecrated life for granted. To be consecrated means to be set aside for a special purpose, to be dedicated to something out-of-the-ordinary, in short, to be different. It was above all a failure to appreciate this DIFFERENCE — in vesture, in commitment, in the way of worldly interaction — that led to depreciation for religious life in general.

In recent decades, as the numbers of religious have plummeted, St. Teresa's question has taken on a particular resonance. Many Catholics now live in a world where they no longer come into contact with religious. The whole Church suffers as a result.

Catholic schools are simply not the same as when they were staffed, almost entirely, by communities of religious women or men. Catholic hospitals are different than when their spirit, and much of their medical and pastoral care, were dominated by sisters or brothers. Our Catholic parishes often struggle to provide the maternal complement to the clergy that mother superior and the sisters did so gracefully. And the whole Church can only begin to assess the impact of fewer contemplative monasteries and cloistered communities.

Sometimes I've heard Catholics say that the decrease in priestly and religious vocations is not altogether bad, for without it, the Church would have never achieved a deeper understanding of the apostolate and call to holiness of Catholic lay people. While that is debatable, no one can contest that lay people have stepped into the vacuum caused by the shortage of priests and religious and have given ample witness that one does not have to be a priest or religious to become a saint, or a good Catholic school teacher, or effectively run a Catholic hospital or charitable institution.

But the development of the laity does not require the decline of religious life. The two are not in competition, just as the limbs and the heart are not in competition! One of the challenges of our era is to demonstrate how they strengthen each other, so that all the states of life in the Church may flourish simultaneously.

Pope John Paul II established the World Day for Consecrated Life on the Feast of the Presentation (the day on which it is celebrated in the Vatican each year) precisely to stress the interconnection between the lay and religious states.

Jesus' presentation evokes our baptism, the time at the beginning of our lives when we, like Jesus, were presented in God's temple and consecrated to his service. Through this baptismal consecration, each of us has begun a consecrated life, participating in Jesus' consecrated life offered to the Father in the Holy Spirit. This general consecration is the foundation of the consecrated life of religious in particular.

At the same time, however, religious life shows those consecrated by baptism the full scope of their life in Christ. The profession of the evangelical counsels is a public identification with Christ, who himself was poor, chaste, and obedient to his Father in everything.

From Christ's poverty, reflected in the poverty of religious, we learn the antidote to the materialism of our age and how to trust in God as our sole treasure.

From his chastity, reflected in religious chastity, we discern the proper response to contemporary hedonism and how to master ourselves in order to give ourselves in love to God and others.

From the Lord's obedience to the Father until death, reflected in religious obedience, we discover the remedy for today's exaggerated autonomy and how God's truth alone sets us free.

Religious men and women, through living the evangelical counsels, become icons of Christ and signposts to the joy of his kingdom.

They show us that God is our greatest gift and is worth everything we are in return.

May we never take them for granted! And may we all follow their beautiful and timely witness!

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.