Café culturel - La vie religieuse aujourd'hui

Être prophète c'est avoir la parole dans l'image.

Être sage, c'est voir l'idée dans la parole

Armand Abécassis

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Au terme du volume II de "Mémoires à l'ultraviolet", je suis hanté par la question de la vie religieuse dans le monde d'aujourd'hui. Quelle est sa pertinence ? À quels besoins peut-elle ou devrait-elle  répondre ? Quelles formes doit-elle prendre ou abandonner ? Les frères éducateurs d'aujourd'hui, ceux qui ont vécu "intra muros" la débacle de la fin du XXe siècle, dépossédés de leur mission apostolique institutionnelle, parviennent-ils à "recyc ler" leur vie religieuse, à lui redonner un sens porteur pour eux-mnêmes et pour le milieu dans lequel ils vivent ?

Ces questions, je les ai posées à tout venant. Aujourd'hui, Brother Marcel S. C. y répond en neuf point bien ciselés qui font ressortir le caractère prophétique de la vie religieuse. Vos commentaires ou vos propres réflexions sur le sujet apporteront de l'eau au moulin de notre Café culturel "extra muros" Bonne lecture.

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Cher ami Florian,

      I will attach to this email a document I wrote recently on the Refoundation of Religious Life: Refoundation II.

I have another document I will send to you when I get home: "My Fix on the Religious Life of the Future" or something like that.      For now, I'll give a few thoughts on the question you presented.

1. Vat. II was the big bang of our times, a first response to the paradigm shift we are experiencing.  It made Religious Life aware of and issued a call to Religious to renew so as to be relevant to modern people.

2. The difficulty of responding to this was that the Church had taught for centuries that truth never changes and condemned modernism as a grave error.  Add to this the tendency of church leaders to "restore" the Church to pre-Vatican forms and ways, any kind of re-envisioning of religious life is extremely difficult.

3. Somewhere around Vatican II, we Brothers moved from a quasi monastic spirituality to an apostolic spirituality and even more into the evolution of spirituality for our times.

4. New concepts emerged from Vat. II.  The vows: poverty is seen now as availability; chastity, as loving relationships; obedience, as the listening of the community (all Christians) to the working of the Spirit.  God: a new concept of God and creation emerged, the result of a new consciousness of life and revelation.  The way of creation is now seen as the primary revelation, God being at the heart of creation and of the universe.  Relationships: We seem to realize more and more that Jesus was concerned with relationships, with awareness and how God's grace is a gift to everyone, to all of creation.  Everyone and all things are the subject of God's love and that his call is to freedom for all, to life in its fullness.

5.  The sense of Religious Life before Coindre, during his time and after, was fixed by Church law or Church leadership, but it was the context of a "work force" which constituted the response to the dream and vision of the founders.  The vision of the founders was very prophetic in that it gave rise to a response to an urgent need, to the dehumanized condition of peoples and areas of the world.  Work force and institution was necessary to give form and stability to the founder's response, but it is not of the essence of religious life.  Religious life is a prophetic life form, and like Jesus, not hierarchical, institutional, cultural and social.  It seems the call to religious life today is to recover its prophetic character and give us its traditional institutional work and character.

6. Vat. II based vocation on baptism, which in practice gave the laity the right to ministry, to do what we did for many years.  In fact, lay people have taken over our schools, correctly so, and it will likely be their ministry to continue catholic education and improve it.  The New Orleans Province has been preparing our lay partners for catholic education for more than 30 years now.

7. The theme of our recent Chapter was "A Call to Prophetic Ministry," which to me indicates that we must try to recover our prophetic character.  Like Coindre, our prophetic character must lead us to go in response to urgent and glaring needs, to minister to the unmet needs of the next level of awareness and spirituality.

8. Some aspects of religious life today are: shared prayer, communal spiritual discernment, participation in ministry, a new kind of availability, giving more importance to relationships.

9. Refoundation of religious life seems to be the name of the game today, because the context of foundation no longer exists, that is, the specific urgent need no longer exists, and the prophetic aspect of foundation is no longer there.

     Voila!  I would be happy to continue this conversation if anyone wishes to do so.   Marcel