On the other hand, if someone thinks they may have a vocation to the religious life or priesthood, I would encourage them to try it out. There’s a reason that a person doesn’t take vows immediately or get ordained immediately. The years leading up to a permanent commitment are part of the time of discernment. If it turns out the person isn’t called to that life, there’s still much benefit that can come from having lived it for some period of time.
I agree with you 100% on that score. There is nothing wrong with asking for admission to the religious life, male or female. Some saints were turned down several times before being admitted. There is something to be said for perseverence when one believes that one is truly following Christ’s call.
I guess whaI I may have poorly addressed is the so called freedom to leave. Just as you are ot free to enter, you are not as free as you think to leave once you have made final vows. I’m very concerned that women religious in the USA and some European and Canadian communities as well, believe that they can bypass the system or the institutional Church, as if their religioius vows were a private commitment between them and God or between them and their congregations.
This is not the true doctrine on religious life for either brothers or sisters. I’m deliberately leaving priests out of this, because you can be a priest without being a religious. About half of the priests in the Western Church are not religious. They are secular men. All married deacons are clerics, but they are not religious. They too are secular men. Priests who belong to Secular Orders are also secular men.
A religious is a man or woman consecrates his or her life to live the Gospel much more deeply through the public profession of chastity, poverty and obedience. We live this intense Gospel life in a very organized or structured community with rules, traditions, history, spiritual goals and ministries that are for the sole purpose of achieving the perfection of charity, not the solution of every social ill.
Today, there seems to be a strong movement among many women religious to in two different directions. The fist is the remnant group from what I consider a mistaken translation of Vatican’ II’s request that religious return to their original charism. Many returned to the original ministry, but left behind the orignial customs, discipline and prayer life of the community, along with their obedience to canonical authority.
The second group of sisters that we have seen coming up since the 1940s are the likes of the Missionaries of Charity, the Franciscans Sisters of the Renewal, the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculata, the Sistes of Life in NY, the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, the Poor Clares, and many other religioius communities that have settled for the cloistered life or the mendicant life. It seems that the mendicant and the enclosed communities of women are recovering and new ones are rising.
What I’m encouraging is that those who are considering the religious life, male or female, try to look at communities that are rising, because they seem to show balance.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
