Secular vs Secularism and Consecrated Virginity

[[Dear Sister, what is the difference between secular and secularism? When you say that a consecrated virgin is a secular it makes my stomach clench some. It just sounds so wrong. Totally!]]

Hi there! Yes, it is hard to shake off the connotations or associations with the term secular that have been inculcated for such a long time, isn't it? You sound relatively young to me in your post, but I am sure you are used to thinking of secularity as irreligious just as most folks who have been around since before Vatican II. I admit that to hear someone say "x or y is a secular," causes a similar gut reaction in me (though partly because it sounds demeaning to me). But, we really have to get beyond this because "secular" in its most general sense simply means that whatever we describe this way has to do with the world. Since "the world" is a multivalent or "tensive" symbol it is not generally a pejorative term.

It can and does refer first of all to God's good creation. After this it refers to the human world which is ambiguous --- God's good creation distorted by human sin and the powers of evil and death which is still called to reconciliation with God and the fulfillment of its deepest potentials. Only then does it refer some of the time to "that which is resistant to Christ." As I noted before then, a secular vocation means a call to live out one's discipleship within the world. In a sense the original disciples can be said to have been called to secular vocations; Mary Magdalene as apostle to the Apostles was called to a secular vocation. It is possible to argue that Jesus' own vocation to incarnate the Word of God exhaustively in every moment and mood of sinful reality was a secular vocation (though he clearly transcends any single category as well). Obviously such vocations were not irreligious or second class. They were countercultural, apostolic, and prophetic; indeed they were all profoundly Godly and sacred --- but carried out in the saeculum in a way meant to transform and bring it to a transcendent fulfillment, and for this reason, secular. Today, in a church where roles and forms of life are more differentiated than in the primitive Church, when we refer to secular vocations we mean calls to discipleship which are lived out in the normal structures, and institutions of the world in order to transform those: the political, economic, familial, corporate arenas, etc.

Secularism is a different animal though. Secularism, in the present context, refers to an ideology where the values of the world distorted by sin rather than the values of the Kingdom of God (that is, reality under the dominion of God) are the ones that defines one's life, one's way of seeing, thinking, relating, etc. It means that we look at these things as separate from God and seek to be ultimately fulfilled by them. As I wrote in another post on secularism as a disease of the heart, [[It is common to think of secularism as an inordinate esteem for the profane, something that reaches idolatrous proportions at times. But contrary to part of this analysis, I think that at its root secularism has more to do with the failure to regard reality, ALL of reality, as fundamentally sacred, as gift of God, as that which is to be honored and regarded in light of the One who grounds and gifts it. Secularism occurs precisely when we compartmentalize reality into the sacred and the profane. It occurs when we refuse or are unable to see the innate tendency [and capacity] of all things to reveal to us the God who grounds them, or to participate in and contribute to the goal of human and divine history: that God might be all in all. In short, it is a failure to take a sacramental view of reality.]]

When the Church affirms the vocation to consecrated virginity as a (consecrated) secular vocation she says it is precisely a vocation which 1) regards all of reality as potentially Sacramental, which 2) refuses to compartmentalize it in terms of sacred and profane, and which 3) works from within it to realize the world's profoundly holy potential. In this sense the consecrated virgin in the world is not only an icon of the Church, she is an icon of the world as it is called and meant to be by God.