Document Religiosorum Institutio (1961)

I was recently alerted to a very interesting and telling document of which I had never known, Religiosorum Institutio of the Congregation for Religious, the "Instruction on the Careful Selection And Training Of Candidates For The States Of Perfection And Sacred Orders."

Check out the whole thing over on Adoremus.org, EWTN, which (also) preserves a lot of rare and largely forgotten documents. (For example, for all of you traddy priests out there, when some dear soul tells you that your maniple is no longer permitted, you can send him over to Adoremus where he may read in Tres abhinc annos that it is only "no longer required." But I digress.)

Religiosorum Institutio is fascinating to me on a number of levels. Sometimes I think that those of us who grew up after the Council--and who perhaps seek to retrieve religious life from some of its twentieth century wanderings--can get this idea that everything was stable up until the time of the post-conciliar reforms, or worse, that everything was just fine until the reform wrecked everything. This document, among many others, shows that there were deep shifts going on before the time of the Council and its subsequent reforms. Religious life in particular was changing along with the world around it; how vocations came about was shifting along with the questions of the religious themselves.

The document is especially concerned with the responsible pastoral care of vocations and the selection of those who are admitted to clerical institutes in particular. Some parts of it are quite sad, such as this section on those who stay in religious life because they don't know what else to do:

At times such candidates, on the verge of Sacred Orders or perpetual profession and somewhat mature in age, finding themselves without academic degrees and untrained in any art or liberal profession, were afraid to leave the religious life, feeling deep down in their hearts that if they returned to the world, they could not make an upright living unless by manual labor, or would be obliged to make difficult and uncertain efforts to acquire a liberal profession. Therefore they regarded the decision to continue in the religious clerical life as a lesser evil.

(By "liberal profession" we may presume that the document means a career derived from a liberal education.)

Other sections strike prophetically at the condition of religious life, even fifty years later:

Lastly, not infrequently there is adduced as a cause the loss of the religious spirit either because, under the insidious impact of present-day naturalism, these priests become incapable of discipline and religious observance, or because, living in religious houses an indolent and unproductive life, deceived by the desire of life outside and ill-regulated pseudo-apostolic activism and neglecting the interior life, they fall victims to dangers of all kinds, which they do not avoid and do not even recognize.

Make of the document what you will, but it's certainly interesting not only as a glimpse into concerns just prior to the Council, but even on its own and in its wisdom for our own time.

Advent

I have come to love Advent more and more over the years. This year, with Christmas falling on a Saturday, we have the longest possible Advent season.

On the one hand, it's just such a sweet time of year to have a fresh start of things. You get out your volume one or pars prior breviary; for various reasons it is usually the Advent-Christmas volume of the Liturgy of the Hours that is in the best condition in any given set. Combine that with a new ordo, and it gives you the feeling of fresh start on the natural level, like when you had sharp crayons on the first day of school. The day-to-day liturgical texts and colors change for the first time in what seems like ages.

On a deeper level, though, I find Advent to be among the most mystical times in the year. It is a time for us who stand in between. On the one hand we celebrate as we recall with joy the first coming of Christ, a coming that was humble, and, as we sometimes forget, secret. On the other hand, we look forward with wonder to the second coming of Christ in full and public glory, when he will bring the whole creation to its final destiny.

What's mystical to me about the season is the way in which it seems to emphasize the two comings of Christ in the reverse of their logical and temporal order: The liturgy of the early days, especially the first Sunday, focuses us on the end times, but as we go forward, and certainly by the time we arrive at the 'pre-octave' of the Nativity on December 17, we are fully into a celebration of the first coming of Christ.

We begin at the end times and proceed backwards to the dawn of our salvation in the Nativity of the Lord. We then notice how our own lives are moving in the course of a return from this recollection: the secret intimacies of grace and prayer in our own lives, in which the presence of Christ is conceived and carried in our own hearts, are moving toward a full and public harvest in the communion of the saints in heaven. Christ's movement from his conception by the Virgin to his ministry and passion and final glorification is also the journey of each Christian soul con-formed to Christ by Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. Each secret and humble moment of prayer we experience in this life is destined for the final joy of heaven. Prayer is the Lord's Nativity in us, and it will become our Resurrection in Him as well.

Remembering Charity in Conflict

This post is meant as a continuation of what I wrote yesterday, and a reminder to myself that we have to remember charity and mutual understanding even within our conflicts in the Church in general and religious life in particular.

Yesterday afternoon I went somewhere offer a memorial Mass for a small group of nice people. It was perfectly pleasant and I tried to do my best for them. In the front of the small assembly was a woman, not old but perhaps in later middle age, who made all the responses and prayers loudly and strongly, with all of the standard adjustments and changes for so-called 'inclusive language.'

It would be easy for me simply to rant about it. I don't want to live in a relativistic world in which everyone is their own pope, and each of us has the right to alter the Church's prayer to suit his or her own concerns.

But to just rant is a failure in charity. Yes, we must stand up against the errors and misunderstandings of our time. But we also have to try to appreciate each other, and to recognize that those who do wrong-headed things often do them with the best intentions and with genuine values at stake. The woman in front of me perhaps grew up in a world in which she was made to feel like less, as someone with fewer opportunities in life than her male counterparts. Perhaps she grew up in a world with a lot of 'rules' which didn't seem to have a function or make any sense. So maybe, just maybe, for her to use this so-called 'inclusive language' in her own prayer at Mass represents and symbolizes for her an intense experience of liberation she has had over the course of her life.

I think that this can be hard for many of us younger Catholics and religious to understand. We grew up not with oppressive systems of rules, but in the relativistic, post-modern vertigo. We grew up oppressed not by rules but by their absence. Our grandparents in religious life (our parents are mostly missing) found in their vocations a liberation from a previously ossified and oppressive culture, a liberation from the rules. We have found in our vocations a liberation from relativism and moral anarchy, a liberation to the rules.

This isn't anything new, and it has been better written by others. I just mean to say that as we work to recover our Catholic identity from the errors and wanderings of those who have gone before us, let us remember that they too were children of their time, and that the Spirit of God spoke to them in their liberation as well. No doubt I have own pet myopias, and errors that will need to be corrected by those who come after me. If I want to be treated like a thoughtful and charitable person when that day comes, I need to do it for others now.

The Real Vocations Crisis?

I was alerted to the latest appearance the other day of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist on the Oprah show. Some of us who were home watched it together. Their ceremonies of religious profession were presented. It was quite beautiful and encouraging to see. On the same day I got a fund raising mailing from the Benedictines in Clear Creek.

These communities, and others, show that there is no shortage of vocations to religious life. Communities that embrace an unapologetic Catholic identity, are committed to a clear and Catholic mission, and center their lives on the ordinary and traditional means of holiness recommended by the Church have no shortage of young people wanting to enter.

So, could it be that there are many more potential religious vocations out there, but that they go unnoticed and under-nurtured because some of us religious are still resisting these 'signs of the times' and don't want to hear 'what the Spirit is saying to the Churches'?

XXXIV Per Annum

In one my classes this semester the professor remarked that the most recent reform had removed the Dies Irae from the liturgy. True, it disappeared as the sequence for funerals and some Masses for the dead, but it didn't go away altogether.

The Dies Irae persists as an optional hymn for the Liturgy of the Hours during this last week of Ordinary Time. If you look in your breviary this time of year, you will find it broken up for the various hours. In the typical edition it appears at the beginning of the proper for the week, starting on page 489. If you have the Catholic Book Publishing Company American English LoH, it's in an appendix, starting on page 2013.

But here's my question. I know this will be a surprise, but I can't find the rubric that permits the Dies Irae this week. Perhaps that's all it is, the note at the beginning of the proper for the week in the typical edition, conveniently omitted in the English version. Does this option appear anywhere else?

Singing

There is a happy coincidence in the liturgy today: On the feast of St. Cecelia, one of the great patron saints of sacred music, we have arrived in our reading from Revelation at the scene of the saints singing the "new hymn" to God. (14:3)

We who desire to be devout people are regular singers. But sometimes I think we don't always remember to reflect on what a deep thing it is to sing a hymn to God. It's not just added ornamentation or solemnity, but something far more profound. Indeed, to sing a hymn to God is to imitate God himself and conform ourselves to Him.

What happens when we sing a hymn? A blend of truth and beauty emerges from our voice, from our body, mind, and heart. Thus, to sing draws us closer in con-formity to He Who Is Truth and Beauty Itself. In fact, God sings too. When a blended array of truth and beauty emerges from the Heart of God, we call this creation. So to sing a hymn or a text of the Sacred Scriptures is to imitate the creative Delight out of which everything is. That's why to sing automatically makes people joyous, or at least gives some relief from their misery.

The Latest Condom Business

The press and everyone else are having fun with this one.

Last night I heard (from a regular commenter on this blog, no less) a fine analogy to what Benedict seems to have said on the moral level: When robbing a bank, just don't shoot the teller.

In other words, the sort of case that the Pope seems to raise is already cut off from openness to new life and is already a case of compounded disorder, injustice, and misery. In such a case, perhaps using a condom to (perhaps) prevent the transmission of HIV could mitigate the tragedy of the whole business and be the beginning of a journey to real morality.

The problem with contraception is that it attempts to divide the unitive and life-giving powers of sexuality. The rotten fruit of this separation--which has been more or less accomplished in our culture--is in evidence all around us. In the sad and sinful case in which the Pope is speaking, neither of these powers is present in the first place, so there is nothing to frustrate through the use of a condom.