Brother JR has touched on a key point: Each order and society has a Charism*; not every order nor society is intended to produce clerics, and a few have no place for clerics in their order or society.
The Franciscan orders (plural) have a variety of charisms; none of them has the defined charism of providing priests to the dioceses.
In fact, few orders/societies** have a charism involving clerics at all. Most orders only have clerics to provide for their own need to participate in liturgies daily as part of their rule.
Those few religious communities which provide clerics as part of their charism seldom have non-clerics other than novice-seminarians.
*Purpose is a close term, but lacks the fullness of the term Charism
** the two are not the same, but few people actually make the distinction.
The reason for this is that the religious orders of men and societies of apostolic life, unlike the congregations, were founded to be the backbone of the Church, not the ministers of the Church. The orders were founded to sanctify their members. Because these religious are part of the Body of Christ, the graces that they attain are shared with the Body.
Men enter religious orders for their own salvation, first; for the salvation of their brothers, second; and for the salvation of the laity and diocesan clergy, third. There is a hierarchy of charity. One’s first obligation is to one’s soul, then to the soul of one’s family and finally to those outside of the familly.
Those religious who became very involved in serving the laity have paid the price during the last 100 years. Some communities became clericalized, meaning that they lost their identity as consecrated men by becoming communities of parish priests. This was the last thing that the great founders ever wanted.
Other communities became secularized. Their apostolate, such as teaching, became their focal point. Everyone knows that you do not have to be a consecrated religious to be a good teacher. A consecrated religious is a man of prayer, penance, community and service. He is above all obedient, secondly detached and third he is attached to his brothers by virtue of his vow of chastity.
When teaching, healthcare and other apostolates became so important that religious men began to excuse themselves from their spiritual obligations in order to spend more time on serving the people, they began to lose their identity and their effectiveness. They traded being for doing.
What most religious orders are doing now is going back to being over doing. Some do nothing at all except live in a neighborhood and preach by their presence. The Franciscans of the Primitive Observance are the best example that comes to mind. They never set foot in a parish. They never celebrate a mass for the laity. They never hear anyone’s confession except that of the brothers and never celebrate any of the other sacraments. They have no apostolate. They live in a neighborhood where they pray, work with their hands and spend the day walking around town talking to people and visiting their neighbors. When they’e not doing this, they are together in their house serving their brothers just as the first Franciscans did. Only two of their brothers are priests. When one of them dies or gets too old to celebrate mass, Christ will let the superior know whom to call forward to be ordained.
Orders like the Dominicans who always had many priests, but were never meant to be in parishes or working among Catholics. They were founded to serve the interests of the Church in the world of education and in preaching to heretics. But we have abused them and insisted that they take on parishes because there is a shortage of secular priests. In other words, we have made the problems of the laity the problems of the religious to solve, forgetting that the religious were laymen who left the world of the secular and have not been called to return to that world. By imposing this on them, there is no mystery as to why they have lost vocations. Men want to be Dominicans who are like Dominic. They want to do what Francis did, what John Bosco did or John de La Salle.
To imply that the SSPX is more courageous than other societies and orders, because they are critical of this or that, is an unfair statement. Christ does not call other orders and societies to do that. It is not our place to raise our voice to contradict a pope, bishop, superior or council. It is forbidden by our founders, forbidden by our general chapter and forbidden by canon law.
We look at the Church and her hierarchy and we see Christ acting through his Apsotles. Just as the first apostles made mistakes, today’s apostles also make mistakes, but we do not retract our allegience or obedience, because their mistakes do not take away from what has been revealed to us, “Christ speaks to us only through them.” As St. Paul said, “There is no private interpretation of scripture.” Paul made it very clear who had the right to interpret revealed truth and it was not the faithful, only the Apsotles. Peter makes it very clear that the faithful were to put aside their anger at the Apostles and to respond to them with great mercy and great humility. There was a point during Peter’s reign when the faithful questioned much of what the Apostles did or did not do. Peter writes about the importance of charity and humility.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
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