Sister, Why are you Personally Interested in the vocation of CV's living in the World?

[[Dear Sister Laurel, while I appreciate what you have written about canon 604 vocations, I wonder why it is of such interest to you. You are not a CV, nor discerning a vocation to this. Why are you continuing a conversation which does not personally interest you?]]

Thanks for your questions. I have written about this before a little more than a year ago so I would suggest you look at the posts on consecrated secularity and CV's from that time. Even so, I can summarize my concerns and interest for you. It begins with the fact that this vocation made NO sense to me either theologically or pastorally until I read Sister Sharon Holland,. IHM's essay on the place of the Consecrated Virgin in today's Church. As I wrote a year ago, before that I felt it was a reality "in search of a job description" or "raison d'etre", neither fish nor fowl --- rather like secular institutes sometimes seemed, but without the benefits of community life, vows, or a Rule of Life. It was the secularity, and especially the consecrated or eschatological secularity of the vocation which allowed its charismatic import as gift of the Holy Spirit to become theologically clear to me. Once this happened I could see this was not some half-hearted vocation for those unwilling or somehow unable to adopt the whole reality of religious life (what the LA Province called a "fallback vocation"), but instead a whole-hearted and very challenging call to a qualified (specifically, an eschatological) secularity the world is destined for. When I ask myself what allows me to understand this vocation as a gift of the Holy Spirit and to explain the vocation positively rather than in terms of what it is not, this is the primary element which allows me to do that.

So, to summarize the important elements of my PERSONAL interest:

1) Contrary to what some argue, consecrated secularity is hardly common or as natural as breathing. The Church has a long history of esteeming consecrated life but not so of secular vocations which have been seen as profane and hardly a way to holiness. This changed with Vatican II and the Church still needs a holiness which is modeled by those leading thoroughly or radically secular vocations which are ALSO radically and consciously consecrated. These vocations contrast belief in a God who ultimately makes a Sacrament of this world with secularism so we need people who embrace such vocations and make the distinction clear with their lives. I am completely committed to Vatican II and to its recovery of this  eschatologically secular vocation and the theology of a universal call to holiness.

2) Some are arguing that making this vocation a quasi-religious vocation (vows, distinctive garb, titles, post-nomial initials, etc) is actually a deepening of it and that younger CV's are thus doing this when older CV's have lived a mediocre consecrated secularity. I argue that this is instead a betrayal of the vocation as the Church clearly understands it, and that if these changes are made the vocation will cease to be meaningful, much less truly charismatic, and speak to no one. (These women will not speak to religious --- who would thus live a more radical religious life than CV's, nor would they speak to secular members of the Church who are called to embrace and witness to the Kingdom of God within the world in all of its everyday dimensions. Both the Church and the WORLD needs this  radically eschatological AND radically secular witness desperately because what VII called everyone to was an exhaustive holiness wherever their vocations were lived. This is still not well understood in terms of secularity.)

3) The arguments the Church uses are historical, theological, liturgical, pastoral, canonical, etc and because of this these reasons for calling the vocation a form of sacred secularity are interesting to and rightfully addressed by theologians. It is neither appropriate nor accurate to neglect the historical contexts pertinent to this vocation's nature and significance (Vatican II  and Centuries 1-12 especially, but also the reality of consecrated virginity as it existed BEFORE the Church hierarchy began to control it in the second century)  and then argue this is a "proto-religious" vocation or "more radical" than what women have lived for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, this is what I have heard some CV's without apparent theological, historical, or pastoral sophistication doing. (Part of this involves ignoring the variety of authoritative ways the Church teaches and only paying serious attention to de fide statements, for instance. Part of it involves suggesting a witness to sacred or eschatological secularity is not even needed by today's world. Someone with theological training and a personal acquaintance with consecrated and Religious life needs to counter these tendencies.)

4) Thus, I am concerned with this issue because the vocation was actually subverted in the past when it became associated with ONLY its religious (cloistered) expression and the original secular expression was wholly lost in 1139. This should not be allowed to happen again, especially when the vocation which reprises the original secularity of the call is only 30 years old. I am concerned with this because as a hermit I deal with world-hating (and world-demeaning) language all the time. I am in a unique position to reflect on the meaning of the term "the world" both exegetically, canonically, experientially,  and theologically and too, on the significance of secular vocations. Similarly, I am concerned with any notion of vocation which ignores the development of Vatican II and its universal call to exhaustive holiness along with the clear teaching that ALL the baptized are called to live some form of the evangelical counsels and are encouraged to pray the Liturgy of Hours.

Pastorally I have dealt often, and even regularly with the pain of those called to lay (and/or secular) vocations who mistakenly think they must make private vows to embrace a radical discipleship or aspire to authentic holiness. (Instead they need to specify the demands of their baptismal consecrations and/or marriage vows regularly. Too few have done this because they don't see Baptism as a call to radical discipleship.) It is a VERY common thing to hear lay people who are, almost by definition, usually called to secular vocations (lay hermits are different) to complain they feel called to a third class or entry-level vocation which makes them called but not really "chosen." It is similarly common to hear these same people asking the related question of whether the Church REALLY esteems secular vocations or has merely thrown them a few crumbs in revising their roles during liturgy. The theology supporting such notions is abhorrent.

5) Finally, I have the sense that SOME of the younger CV's are unclear on their own motivations in all of this. I think there is too much accent on NOT being mistaken for laity or members of secular institutes, or on separating oneself from them in visible ways. I believe some of these CV's have bought into a very worldy misunderstanding (worldly in the worst sense) of Thomas Aquinas' teaching on the objective superiority of religious vocations and that they demean or denigrate secular vocations in spite of VII or the call to a New Evangelization. I believe that some of these women are resistant to thinking paradoxically as the Gospel requires of us and therefore are fostering a way of thinking which is fundamentally Greek and pagan rather than truly Christian. I also believe that some of these women do not really understand the import or content of religious poverty or religious obedience and the very different freedom that issues from these as opposed to properly secular expressions of the evangelical counsels. Like others, I wonder why these women did not simply pursue religious life if they truly believe the secularity of the original call which persisted for more than 11 centuries side by side the religious expression was wrong or somehow immature and in need of deepening.

I hope this helps answer your questions.