21 January 2013

Is the term "Quasi-Religious" Respectful?

[[Dear Sister,
    is it fair or respectful to speak of Consecrated Virgins wanting to live a "quasi-religious" life? There are certain things held in common by all consecrated life. If a CV wants to live her consecration in a more radical way what is it to you?]]

Thanks for your questions. In the main, the term quasi-religious merely refers to something which is not really or fully a religious life in the technical sense of that term and not really or truly a secular life either. It does not touch on the matter of consecration per se and, while it is a critical term for me, it is not meant to be disrespectful. When we look at the various vocations in the Church there are essentially two ways of relating to the world: the first is Religious life (whether apostolic, ministerial,  cloistered, ordained, or eremitical, the relationship to the world is marked by degrees of separation, qualification, and mitigation);  the second is secular life (whether lay persons, members of secular institutes, secular priests, or CV's living in the world), the vocations are lived IN the world and are not marked by the forms or means of separation which mark Religious life. Thus, when I use the term "quasi-religious" is it an empirical term marking something as neither x nor y.

As I have noted before, Religious life qualifies one's relationship with and in the world. While one may minister in and to it, community, vows, habit, Rule and constitutions mark one as non-secular. In every major area of life (power, finances or economics, and relationships) the Religious' participation in the secular world is limited. While she witnesses to Kingdom values she also witnesses to separation from the world as a value those called to secular vocations do not and cannot embrace in the same ways. There is implicit criticism of the saeculum and from those who live secular lives bound into some of the praxis characteristic of Religious life. This is why some (many) Religious choose to forego distinguishing garb, etc. They know this distinguishes and distances them from those living secular lives. While the non-secularity can be helpful as well, too often the distancing and implicit criticism implied by vows and garb makes Religious relatively inaccessible to others and makes them hard to relate to. When Religious do experiment with changes it tends to be in the direction of accessibility, more powerful witness. and communion with others, not distinction from them. In other words, they act to mitigate things which represent unnecessary barriers to ministry and witness. They do not multiply these.

Thus, when a vocation is secular rather than Religious, even as the vocation to Consecrated virginity for women living in the world is secular, it becomes even more important that this secularity be embraced wholeheartedly. The graces associated with Consecrated Virgins living in the world includes spousal love,  for instance, and unfortunately, most Catholics are only aware of this imagery applying to nuns. But actually everyone in the Church is called to the spousal love which marks God's love for Israel and for the Church -- the spousal love which, in other words, marks God's love for his entire People. Most contemporary Religious don't resonate with this dimension of the Gospel message and those that do tend to represent a perspective on it which separates it from  everyday life and sees it as relatively rare. But Consecrated Virgins living in the world live and model this love in a way which transforms their secularity into something specifically eschatological while it thus summons all persons to recognize their call to spousal love in this world. Only a vocation which is both radically consecrated and  exhaustively secular and therefore which is especially graced as the lives of CV's are could carry this off effectively.

It seems to me that the only way a consecrated virgin living in the world could consider secularity "in the weak" or mitigated sense to be a more radical form of her vocation is if she treats secularity and consecration as necessarily antithetical to one another. But it seems very clear to me that the Christ Event disallows this. The passion of Christ is marked by the rending of the veil between sacred and profane, secular and consecrated. Anyone truly participating in Christ's passion or the Kingdom it established among us cannot re-establish the divisions Jesus' death tore asunder! Real radicalness or radicality is a matter of following Jesus exhaustively ---wherever he calls one to do this. The discipleship of some peoples' secular lives is certainly more radical than the lives lived by some in the monastery while the contrary is also true. The mistake is in treating the consecrated state (which means a state in which one is set apart for God) as also necessarily meaning set apart FROM secularity.

A similar mistake I see CV's making is treating consecrated virginity as proto-religious and then linking this  conclusion to the notion that Religious life is somehow a more radical form of Christian discipleship than the original secular form of consecrated virginity. It is as though secular consecrated virginity was an undeveloped or superficial form of the life it was meant to be and that it only grew to maturity or deepened as Religious life. But this ignores history at several points. First, while CV's contributed to the development of religious life, so did the desert movement. Secondly, cenobitical or communal life was not understood as the maturation of the life of virgin martyrs or hermits (desert dwellers), but rather as a mitigated form of life meant for those who were either not called to solitary life, or who could not avoid the dangers of eremitical life. Thirdly, CV's did not simply develop into Religious (cloistered) life. Instead a secular form of it continued into the 12C. In no sense was it proto-religious. In no sense was it necessarily a less radical form of discipleship than the cloistered expression. The Church has specifically recovered THIS expression of the vocation with the Rite of Consecration of women living in the world. Fourthly, the original Virgin-martyrs lived a radical discipleship which could not have been deeper or more radical. St Perpetua was not a "proto-nun" nor was her life "quasi-religious"; she was a wife and mother who lived her faith in a distinctly secular arena.

Another and related mistake I hear CV's making links secularity exclusively with the laity. Vatican II certainly did point out that the laity were called to live their vocations as secular ones but she did so without simply identifying the two. It is not the case that a secular vocation is necessarily a lay vocation nor that in asking a CV living in the world to live a secular life the Church is somehow forgetting these women are in the consecrated state. Further, Vatican II tried very hard to be clear that secular vocations were significant ones. However,  remember that the council occurred prior to the renewal of the vocation of CV's living in the world and that in fact, it was Vatican II with its strong emphasis on the dignity of secular vocations which mandated the rewriting of the Rite of Consecration and the recovery of its secular expression.  The universal call to holiness certainly meant that ALL were called to an exhaustive holiness, but it ALSO meant that whether one lived in a monastery, a remote hermitage, an urban convent or apartment with other Sisters, or in the midst of the saeculum (and so, whether one lived as a Monastic, Eremite, Religious, or Secular person) the call was a radical and even exhaustive one which COULD be achieved in this specific context.

Thus, I am personally all for any person living their vocations as radically as they can and are called to live it. But CV's cannot define radical as "less secular" and pretend their consecration or the history of their vocation demands this. The consecrated state is NOT antithetical to secular life, and assuredly not to eschatological secularity. To begin adding in elements which, for Religious, mark the nun or Sister as separated from the world and called to something other than a secular vocation is not a radicalization of the CV's vocation, but a serious mitigation and compromise of its nature. In other words, CV's are not "proto-nuns" nor are they called to a quasi-religious life. They are called to live lives of prayer and service which witness to the reality of the Kingdom right in the midst of secular life. Moreover, the eschatological witness stems from graces freshly linked specifically to this vocation and given so that ALL might embrace (for instance) the spousal love of God.

So again, while the term "quasi-religious" is meant to disturb and is certainly a critical term (because I am critical of women trying to minimize the essential secularity of their vocations and believe it is theologically, historically, and pastorally unjustified and even destructive of the Church's vision and purpose in renewing this vocation) I don't believe it is disrespectful. It points to a compromised form of life which refuses to value the secular as an appropriate arena for consecrated life, while (as quasi religious) it is also free of many of  the limitations or constraints as well as the consistency or thoroughgoingness of Religious life. I could also call it "secular-lite" (or "religious-lite" for that matter) but these do seem to me to be disrespectful rather than merely descriptive of something which is and which seeks to be neither truly secular nor truly Religious.