J
JReducation
Guest
I would be speculating if I tried to answer that. My answer is, I don’t know what the pace is. I will tell you this. The pace is much quicker in poor countries than it is in prosperous nations. I was thinking of the De La Salle Christian Brothers the other day. When I attended Catholic University, they were all over the place. Today, you don’t see a single one. However, when I visited the Philippines, their novitiate is full. I think it’s because the younger brothers are very happy, unlike the older brothers of the mid 20th century. These young brothers are teaching in huts, on steet corners, hospitals, rural schools and slums. If you mention to them the possibility of teaching in a Middle Class American parish school, they look at you as if you had small-pox. In other words, they get it. They understand the vision of John de La Salle much better than we did in the mid 20th century.
My own religious family is returning to our roots. We are carving out smaller fraternities out of the larger ones. In the USA alone you have more than 15 new branches of the Franciscan family. All of them are very small. Each of them lives the exact same rule. One would ask, why not remain as one? There are two reasons.
First, Francis never had a vision of a corporation. His vision was a brotherhood. Corporations need many rules, a lot of structure, a lot money to stay in business, and all kinds of infrastructure. If you break down the larger Franciscan obediences into provinces, you recover the brotherhood.
Second, the needs of the Church have changed. The friars were to live and work among the poor. Today’s poor are the unborn, the homeless, the AIDS victim, the runaway teenager, the older person who has no one to visit, the drug addict on the street, the farmer who is about to lose it all, the man who lost his house and job. That’s where the friars have to be. Many friars are asking for permission to live and work in these sectors of society. We live the same rule, but in circumstances that are very different from the ones of the mid 20th century.
I also see a birth of new congregations to meet the needs of the middle class. This is good. The Lord always provides, if we trust. As older religious communities move away from the middle class to return to the poor and the sick, where they were sent to minister, there still remains the soul of the middle class Catholic. The Lord is raising communities just for them. We have wonderful communities as the Dominican Sisters of Mary and the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, the Sisters of the Eternal Word. They are called to serve the middle class. I predict that many American women will join them. My take is that American women are uncomfortable around the poor. Therefore, communities such as the Sisters of Life, Franciscans of the Renewal, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, the Daughters of Charity, Missionaries of the Poor, are getting few American vocations.
We are also seeing an increase in the number of men entering religious life who are choosing not to be ordained. They are responding to the call to consecrate their lives to the Divine Master by living in brotherhood, prayer, obedience, penance, without property, serving the poor or living hidden lives of prayer and manual labor.
The laity can help. You know, religious life always began with laymen. Priests and bishops usually served as spiritual guides until the religious communities took off. It was lay people who heard the call of Christ to follow him into the black holes where the poor live, into the silence of the cloister, into the streets to find the children, sick and elderly. It was lay people who heard Christ calling them to unite to form brotherhoods and sisterhoods where they lived as the Apostles lived, in a communion of love with each other with Christ as their center. That’s where the term Apostolic and Apostolate comes from. The life and work of these men and women was that of the Apostles. They were not all priests. They don’t need to be priests.
I have found that if you push the priesthood and sisterhood, but you leave out the brothers, you lose a lot of good men. There are many good men who want to live for Christ in an intimate communion with him, but are not called to be priests. We have placed such an emphasis on priests, that these men feel that there is no place for them in the Church and they go away or worse, they feel as if their call is a lower calling.
In the poor nations, these men don’t feel this. There is a need for priests to celebrate mass and hear confessions and a need to bring Christ to the black holes where the poor live and die unwanted and unnoticed. When these folks look up into the face of a man and ask, “Who are you?” and they young man says, “I am your brother,” it means something very special.
I work with fathers in crisis pregnancies. They often want an abortion or want to get away and leave the woman to deal with the problem. When I say to them, “I know that you’re afraid, but you are not alone, because I am your brother and I will not leave you,” they look at me in utter surprise. During this past year alone, about 300 men had decided to advocate for the life of their unborn children and to learn how to be fathers.
I can’t give you a timeline. I can tell you what is happening that most people can’t see, especially CAFers, because I bet that most CAFers are not in these desperate situations. I could be wrong.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
