World Day of Consecrated Life
Presentation of the Lord
First Reading: Mal 3:1–4
Second Reading: Heb 2:10–11, 13b–18
Gospel Reading: Lk 2:22–40
In 1997, Pope John Paul II made the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord the annual “World Day of Consecrated Life.” That day is appropriate, he said, because consecrated people dedicate their lives as Jesus did, and their parents give them to the Church as Mary and Joseph gave Jesus.
Christ proposes poverty, chastity, and obedience to every disciple, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, consecrated people make a “public profession,” via promise or vow, of their intention to live by these counsels.
First, poverty. In the beginning, God entrusted the earth to the stewardship of all humans. In our fallen world, private property is legitimate, but “the universal destination of goods remains primordial,” says the Catechism. In religious orders, consecrated people live poverty by holding their goods in common, owning nothing individually. Diocesan priests live it by keeping their personal property within appropriate limits.
As for chastity, we are all called to integrate our sexuality into the totality of our personhood and thus achieve an inner unity of body and soul, says the Catechism.
However, some women, choosing to consecrate their virginity to Christ, become images of the Church, whom St. Paul called “a chaste virgin” betrothed to Christ. In the name of the Church, they give Christ the exclusive love symbolized by marriage.
A man, too, can be directly related to God through perpetual virginity, but his consecration symbolizes oneness, likeness, and identification with Christ as the Church’s Bridegroom.
The love of lifelong virgins for God is even more fruitful than the mutual love of spouses, for they become spiritual parents: nurturing, governing, and disciplining their children in the spiritual life. That is why we call priests “Father,” and why consecrated men and women call the founders of their orders their fathers or mothers “in Christ.”
Lifelong virgins decline something good now for the sake of something better in the future. The fulfillment of their vocation—mystical union with God—will come not in this life, but in the next. At present, they wait for Christ, whom they will love far more than any human, who sometimes lets them feel his presence, but not yet see his face. They are willing to suffer with Christ before they enter into their glory, accepting deprivation and lack of fulfillment in their human nature for the sake of a vastly greater fulfillment in their supernatural nature.
To the world, virginity for the sake of God’s reign “bears witness to the reality of Christian love and its distinctness from sexual expression, just as Christian marriage is a sign of the sacredness of sex as an expression of love,” said Bishop Harry Flynn of Lafayette, Louisiana, at the 1990 Vatican Synod of Bishops on priestly formation.
However, it is perhaps in obedience that consecrated people are most countercultural. At his ordination, a diocesan priest promises obedience to his bishop and his successors. Other consecrated people promise obedience to their superiors.
The world claims that “there is no higher authority than my own wants, needs, and will,” says Cardinal Timothy Dolan in Priests for the Third Millennium. It holds “that true happiness comes only when you have the licence to do what you want, when you want, with whom and to whom you want, how you want, [and] where you want; and that any restraint based on obedience to any higher authority is unjust, oppressive, and to be defied.”
No. We are all called to be obedient to Christ. “He who obeys the commandments he has from me is the man who loves me,” Jesus said. He himself was obedient to his parents and his heavenly Father.
“There is truly a great urgency that consecrated life show itself increasingly full of joy and of the Holy Spirit, that it be propelled down missionary paths, and that it prove itself through living testimony,” said Pope John Paul II.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2 – 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m. – noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Baptism and Confirmation.
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