Life And Death Of Religious Life

[Aya Sophia]

Wonderful article in First Things by Fr. Groeschel (publ 2007 but still completely contemporary), "The Life and Death of Religious Life":  

 http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/05/the-life-and-death-of-religious-life-18

 

Couple excerpts:

 

On liminality of mon life/RL

 

Following the example of such saints as Anthony of Egypt, Paul the Hermit, and Pachomius, an ex-soldier of the Roman legions, men and women took up the pursuit of the vowed life. An important but frequently overlooked variable of that life is a quality known as liminality—the state of being an outsider to the establishment of any society, even one with strong religious characteristics and values.

Liminality derives from the Latin limen (which means threshold or edge) and refers in this case to people who live beyond the accepted norms of the establishment. Obviously chastity, poverty, and obedience to a spiritual master or superior take a person out of any establishment where family life and inheritance are the norm. Such people as St. Benedict, St. Francis, and, in our time, Mother Teresa of Calcutta are obvious examples of liminal personalities. In fact, Turner (Victor Turner, The Ritual Process) spends much time on the study of liminality in the early days of the Franciscan Order.

 

Liminal people stand in sharp contrast even to virtuous members of the establishment. This dichotomy is not a bad thing, although there must always be a degree of liminality in any follower of Christ. We see this in the saintly members of royal families: St. Louis IX of France and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, for example, who wore the Franciscan habit beneath their royal finery and served the poor with zeal and joy. Anyone familiar with religious life at the time of its collapse knows that liminality was almost entirely lost—and remains lost, except for the new communities and a few older ones that have remarkably held the line.

 

On reform/renewal:

Religious life will either reform or disappear. There remain, of course, a few stalwart communities that clung to their identity and purpose through the dark times. They are easily identified now because they have novices and postulants, and some of them are thriving.

The more interesting phenomenon is the creation of new communities largely out of the ruins of older ones—more interesting, because it means that an entirely new approach to religious life is not necessary or even desirable. Instead, new communities can be built on the foundations of older ones by taking rejected traditions and bringing them back to life. It also means that a return to the ideals of an order's founder and embracing the charism that had been granted through that founder (rather than dubious late-twentieth-century interpretations) can prove the difference between survival and extinction.

Edited September 29, 2013 by Aya Sophia

[Gabriela]

A very interesting article indeed. Thank you for posting!