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We can divide this reflecion in three parts/questions:
1. What are the present challenges to Consecrated Life?
2. Taking into account the present reality, what kind of proposals stem from the documents of the Church and from the Latin American Conference of Religious?
3. In the light of these documents, what should be recreated in order to live the challenges of the mission in creative fidelity?
REALITY
CONSECRATED LIFE IN LATIN AMERICA: IDENTITY
MISSION
1 An examination of the reality in the light of the community of Mark: Relationship between economy and consecrated life.
‘The economy factor is one of the first objects of reflection on Consecrated life in the world today, especially seen in relation to Justice and Peace. For the community of Mark, this relation was clear. In the event of the multiplication of the loaves, this relation is present. Let us take a closer look at it.
“I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat” (MK 8:2).
The economy is the area where lies, and should be solved, the question of bread for all. The theology of the community of Mark develops the sense, or the absurdity, of the bread that is not enough for all. The historical reality of the following of Christ must be lived in the life of today’s disciples of Christ, as in the case of the solution of the dramatic question of hunger in the world.
The memory of the Gospel of the Kingdom, tell us how the economy of Imperial Rome exploits the goods of its colonies and demands taxes that impoverish people to the point of having nothing to eat.
This memory has an undeniable economic basis, and it sets us squarely in front of the reality in which we live today.
• Impossibility of giving bread to so many people
• Insufficient amounts of money
• Multiplying the existing bread
• Distributing riches
• Not to amass riches
• Debating the redistribution of taxes
• Giving to the poor (widow): giving from one’s own poverty
• Receiving one hundredfold
• Blessed are the poor
• We cannot serve both God and mammon
2 The economic factor is not simply an external element that appears in the Gospel of Jesus, it is a constant characteristic of it.
God’s manifestation in history and its challenges cannot forget the economic aspect of the life of the world. The economy is the substantial pillar of history and of the human being on earth. God’s revelation marches as a priority towards the dignity and the liberation of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited, the marginalized, the lame, the blind, the sick. The cause of the poor must be the acme of the ethics of Religious Life and of the mission. All this is a consequence of the common and unequivocable economic inadequacy.
God works with the poor and for the poor across the history of the world. With the poor God made a pact, a revealing alliance of salvation. The common denominator of these poor and of this poverty is the real insufficiency of means. Destitution and insufficiency refer to what the human being should have in order to become what he should be, not only in the distributive order of things, but especially in what refers to his identity. Poverty threatens the being and the possessing. To have is to possess things without any primary condition so that the subject may become someone.
Theology, Pastoral Theology and Consecrated Life pass through a process of:
• Emptying of the language of liberation which becomes spiritualized and deprived of economic meaning;
• Discovering the confusion of the semantic and practical sense of the poor and of poverty;
• Estrangement of the analysis of the social sciences in order to return to a philosophical reflection that looks at the world without transforming it.
Generally speaking, the present situation presents two contradictory tendencies:
1. Degradation of the social situation with all the epithets that we can give to a degrading reality that stems from the neo-liberal economic system;
2. Resistence, by society, through creative practices and experimentation in production and in living together.
On the political side, we live in times of democratic living together, with elections and with the mechanisms of political decisions. These elements are fundamental in the process of transformation, but they seem to be inadequate. Other elements must be set up, such as spaces of socio-political sharing, social mobilization and social experimentation. The present socio-economic situation makes us understand that the goal of social struggles will not be attained by simply changing governments but through a process of socio-political participation that has social transformation as its aim.
3 Another kind of world is possible
In many areas of Latin America, there appear certain aspects of another kind of world that is possible and that would take the place of socialism. These aspects keep advancing towards their goal. They point to a society where there would be place for both human beings and for nature: a different kind of world where many worlds and many cultures can live together. This sort of imaginary world came out first in the ideas of the “Zapatists” in México, and were taken up in several other areas of Latin America. It expresses a concrete humanism that defies theory. It is necessary to announce such an imaginary world, even if it seems utopian.
Another possible world lies in finding an answer to today’s dominant society that objects to the existence of any alternative. This answer loses all its meaning if we do not affirm to which kind of world this our new world would belong: a world in which all of us can live. Certainly! We are all there, but there are many things that should not be there: for example, the economic policies of the World Monetary Fund and of the World Bank. This new world offers a critical dimension and follows a certain orientation; this is the world towards which we must march in order to be able to live. This world is a must, it expresses the ethics that is necessary today if humanity wants to survive. This is the ethics of the sustainable world.
Such a sustainable world creates a model alternative society that develops through social and concrete pastoral practices, and above all through the resistance and the inertia of the dominating sectors.
It is necessary to evaluate and back up initiatives of production and education towards organization and living together: these, in their turn, indicate new styles and values. These alternative elements are still fragile, contradictory and unsteady. We have the civil and pastoral responsibility of accompanying them.
4 The challenge of being Church in times of transition
In the Church, a dichotomy is being lived that lies between paralysis and uneasiness. Some point to the need of a new style. The insufficiency of the ‘asking for forgiveness’ for the errors of the past that doesn’t change the structures of the Church is well noticed.
There are many new questions which have not yet ripened enough and which do not need fast changes or rigid directions, but rather a time of courageous reflection. The future of the Church depends on the style of living, assuming and criticizing the contemporary theme. Less prescriptions and more incentives. There are open and inedited questions that are ready to be studied in a climate of trust and pluralism. To this point, the principle of vacatio legis should be applied in the cases in which the experimentation is done before the codification, running the risk. All this demands creativity, audacity and a lot of charity.
The princile that must direct us in all this is hope, which carries along her two sisters, faith and charity, and tries to uncover the horizons of utopia and the great eschatological perspectives of creation.
5 Consecrated Life in Latin America – Medellin and CLAR
Latin America needs a radical cut. It needs the intention of discovering Consecrated Life in the new culture and in modern society. The documents of Medellin show two fundamental principles:
1) Love, charity is the priority. Charity is first, not the vows.
2) Consecrated Life is defined by the situation, from the expectations and the mission of the Church in which it is inserted historically and socially.
The value is not to be found in the text. Texts in themselves do not change anything. Medellin provoked and justified a real and material migration of many religious towards the world of the poor, towards the other face of Latin America in which the Church was absent. This experience of a radically new form of life brought people to re-examine Consecrated Life in a different way, going from the level of the vows to the level of charity (agape). It is here that lies the great challenge of Consecrated Life today: How can we be Christians, which means to live charity?
The insertion among the poor becomes contradictory and obsolete because of the incapacity of structural changes in the formation of new consecrated people. This is still a challenge for us. Without forgetting the conflictual and contradictory aspect which so far has not been solved, we now give the names of some themes and documents of CLAR and of the Brazilian Conference of Religious:
The 1960s
Consecrated Life within the new ecclesial and pastoral context.
The 1970s and 80s
Prophetic Mission as per Medellin and Puebla: option for the poor.
Insertion in the reality of the poor.
Consecrated Life and social justice.
The 1990s
Consecrated Life and mission.
Consecrated Life, gender and culture.
Refoundation.
The 2000s
Integral spirituality.
Basic and ongoing formation.
Redeeming the option for the poor.
New forms of consecration.
The laity.
6 Some challenges to the spirituality of Consecrated Life
1) Consecrated Life must remind today’s people that God cannot be found through superficial emotions. To know and love the true God is fundamentally a commitment of life, that entails love towards neighbor, for the other, for those who are different. It is to make memory of the God who is present especially in the poor, in their living together, because they help us in our conversion, in our becoming more human and more united.
2) Consecrated Life must learn how to make a distinction between charism and institution, in other words, between Consecrated Life and the structures that give expression to it. Attention to the structural and institutional powers. Getting used to certain habits, adapting to a certain mediocrity – these are things that enter the life of all religious institutes. If a reform is not done periodically, bureaucracy grows continually, poverty loses its value, obedience becomes administrative and celibacy becomes the great sacrifice offered to God and which deserves great compensations. It is necessary to decide what we are looking for. Do we want to save Consecrated Life or preserve the institutes? Do we want to look for a new expression of Consecrated Life, or do we look for the survival of the institute in the midst of changes?
3) Consecrated Life is characterized by the radicality of the search for God that calls us and attracts us to look for him more and more. We live this fundamental experience by practicing dialogue and being sensitive to respecting and loving the many alternatives around us. A discreet and loving presence that we live as disciples of Christ together with the brethren who look for God in ways that are different from ours.
4) Insertion among the poor demands a process of maturation of our own identity. A person cannot be defined only by its belonging to a religious institute. Human identity is complex. It is the result of many relationships and affiliations. The more signatures I find in my own identity, the more I will be able to insert myself into a reality that is different from mine, and the more I will be able to live in communion with other persons and groups.
Fr. Ricardo Castro,IMC
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