My issue is that I do prefer something more traditional. But am I not too new to be looking at secular orders?
You can’t get more traditional than Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans and Franciscans. The youngest are the Franciscans and they’ve been around for 800 years.
You want to be careful. There is a difference between Traditionalist and Traditional. What to us is Franciscan, Carmelite, Benedictine, or Dominican tradition, to many Traditionalists is not traditional enough. There is a reason for this.
After Vatican I, which ended in 1870, but was not officially closed until 1960, whole other story, the above named orders made many changes that turned out to be great for the laity and tragic for the orders. They were great for the laity, because many friars and monks were ordained and many were assigned to new parishes. You had parishes springing up all over the place thanks to the explosion of new priests. Also, there was an explosion of sisters, especially teaching and nursing sisters.
By 1950s, we all knew that we had made some horrible choices. We were no longer the orders that we had been up to the 19th century. We had become something different. The work we were doing was good and needed to be done, but not by us. The large numbers of priests was also good, but not for us. Religious houses were turning into rectories and friars were turning into diocesan priests, very much like the FSSP and SSPX of today. This way of life is fine for them, because they do not live a consecrated life, but it’s not fine for the consecrated religious.
When the renewal of religious life began, some people misunderstood the word renewal to mean “to plunge forward into some new unknown”. Don’t ask me what they were thinking, because I’m still trying to figure that out.
There were many who understood that renewal meant to go back to the origins and to drop everything that was not part of the original vision of the founder and the first generation of religious in each community.
Whether you went back 100 years to before Vatican I or you plunged into some unknown new invention, the consequences were pretty much the same. The laity and religious who were born after 1870 only knew the Carmelites, Franciscans, Dominicans and Benedictines of their time. To them, it looked like we were destroying everything that was tradition. They rebelled.
I have to restate, there was definitely nonsense going on. There were definitely religious who were not going back, but going down. Putting those turkeys aside, the rest of us who were trying to go back have met with a great deal of resistance from the Traditionalist camp. For two big reasons, I believe.
First, many men and women left. They left, because this new and revised version of religious life was not the community they joined. Even if it was the original model of St. Benedict, Dominic or Francis, it was new to these people. They became upset, frustrated, hurt, confused and other. I was one of them. I left after 14 years. It took me almost 25 years to come back to religious life. It finally dawned on me that the recovery was necessary. I like the word recovery better than renewal, since the word “new” in there gives some people apoplexies. The Traditionalists blamed it all on “modernism”. What they did not realize is that what they called “modernism” had been around for centuries and had been set aside in 1870. For example, priests took over the running of religious orders. If you were not a priest, you were a houseboy.
Every priest, religious or secular, was on 24/7. This was never the case before. Friars and monks lived for their particular vocation. Monks lived to pray. If they had other duties outside, they worked them in around their life of liturgy. Friars lived to be brothers and to contemplate. If you were a Franciscan or Carmelite, you did not have to be a priest to engage in the work of the order. If you were a Dominican Friar, you had to be a priest, but if you chose to be a Dominican Brother, your call was to support the preaching ministry of the order by making sure that all of the physical needs of the community were covered. In either case, friars, like monks, were not available 24/7. They had a community life and they served very specific populations, not everyone. This happened after Vatican I.
It was not the intention of Vatican I that this should happen. It was poor implementation. Does that sound familiar?
Second, when these communities started to recover, after 1970, they lost many men. They also lost the attractiveness. Their life was much more austere; less “priestly” (not really) in the eyes of many people, and their customs from the early ages of their communities came back to the surface. The biggest thing that resurfaced was the idea of obedience to the pope and to bishops. Whether they agreed or not with what came from Vatican II, part of the recovery was recovering the attitude of fraternal obedience and love. The pope and bishop are your brothers and superiors and you do not question them, once you discern that you’re not being asked to sin. This was the mind of the early monks and mendicants.
Who knows? If it is God’s will, I guess it will happen. If not, i’m sure He will make His plans known to me sometime down the road. 