Is Canon 603 Exclusionary?

[[Dear Sister Laurel, you have written any number of times about what is unique about canon 603. I have never heard you saying that it excludes people from the consecrated state. Instead I have heard you saying that the church finally allowed hermits to be included in the consecrated state. Is this the case? Were hermits always understood to be lay persons? How about religious? How were they regarded? What I am most concerned with is whether canon 603 excludes people from being thought of as consecrated as one blogger is now arguing.]]

Thanks for your question and your summary of what you have heard me saying. I think you have heard me very clearly. When I emphasize the Desert Fathers and Mothers were a lay vocation my intention is not merely to be accurate and avoid anachronism, it is  also to point to how varied and significant lay vocations can be and have always been in the Church. But let's be clear, despite being rooted in baptismal consecration, these vocations were not understood as consecrated vocations in the way we use that term today. These and later hermits were not somehow part of the consecrated state (a different and even later category within the church). Hermits could be seen as consecrated when they were part of an institute of consecrated life and made vows within this context, but otherwise, they have not been seen as consecrated except insofar as the  whole People of God is consecrated in baptism.

Remember that the Church was pretty much always divided hierarchically into laity and clerics. Early on there were also ascetics, virgins, and widows. Monastic life pretty much overtook eremitical vocations by the sixth century. (The rise of monastic life from the 3rd C and Benedictinism beginning in the 6th C continued as the Desert Fathers and Mothers died out and eremitism continued as semi-eremitism in the Western Church.) Consecrated virgins outside of monastic life died out (was subsumed into religious life) by the 11th C.  Religious became unofficially a kind of third and median division in the hierarchical schema. In time this ambiguity was clarified. Vatican II and the revised Code of Canon Law especially said very clearly that religious are not a median division in the hierarchy of the Church, not a third or middle level, and that hierarchically speaking, Religious are part of the laity. Even so, solitary hermits were not regarded as part of the consecrated (Religious) life within the Church. Eremitical life was a diverse, often eccentric, or disedifying phenomenon which also had occasional saints, but it  was not considered an instance of consecrated life unless the hermits belonged to an Order or congregation of Religious.

What was significant re canon 603 was that for the first time in the history of the universal Church solitary hermits could be recognized in law as part of the consecrated state.  As I've written before, but with a different emphasis maybe, when Bishop Remi de Roo made his intervention at the Second Vatican Council he had been dealing with a dozen or more hermits who had had to leave their Solemn vows, leave their congregations, and be secularized because they could not be hermits according to the proper law of their congregations. That was the term used: secularized. It was the term meaning antithetical to the consecrated or Religious state. Even today we remember references to religious vs seculars. These monks had to leave the consecrated state and live the silence of solitude as hermits in the lay (or, if they were priests, clerical) states. This was the only possibility that existed in the Church. They could not leave their monasteries and expect to be considered to still be in the consecrated or Religious state. (At this point in history religious and consecrated are essentially synonyms; this changed with the reintroduction of consecrated virgins who were not religious (c 604) and consecrated hermits (c 603).)

In any case, though consecrated with what was called the "second consecration" they no longer existed in the consecrated state and there was no way within the Church to contend or achieve the opposite. Their vows had been dispensed, they had no legitimate superiors (though Bishop de Roo served them as Bishop Protector), and the church generally had no way to canonically govern or legitimately support their eremitical vocations or those of others like them unless they formed a semi-eremitical community under established canons. In other words, solitary hermits who had been secularized were unable to consider themselves consecrated hermits even if they had spent years in religious life and solemn vows.

It is important to understand what these monks had given up in order to live a call to eremitical life in the lay (or clerical) state; they had no other option in attending to God's call. Their situation, and that of others desiring to live lives as solitary consecrated hermits, meant there was a lacuna or gap in Church perception, practice, and law. The church needed to recognize the nature and value of the eremitical vocation in general (no matter the state of life), but particularly, she needed a way for solitary hermits, when this vocation was mutually discerned, to be initiated into the consecrated state with all that implied. Canon 603 was the result and it filled this gap. That occurred in 1983.

Canon 603 was not added as an option for those who liked law, were legalistic, or simply prideful. It was not added so Bishops could discipline recalcitrant lay hermits. (First, there weren't many in the Western church, and second, admission to the consecrated state is not the way the Church deals with difficult or troublesome people or situations.) It was added because the Church as a whole had never had a way to consecrate solitary hermits. Indeed, the Church had rarely wanted to do so! Some bishops had seen the value of eremitical life and taken anchorites under their care in the Middle Ages while other (mainly male) hermits wandered the land, sometimes helpful (ferrymen, foresters, etc.) and often simply eccentric or bizarre. While legends grew up around hermits (the source of most stereotypes) and some were considered quite holy, they were never part of the consecrated life of the Church because they did not belong to Religious Institutes.

When one reads the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one must be careful not to read it anachronistically. The same is true of Canon 603. It has never been meant to exclude hermits through history from the consecrated state (as though it could do so retroactively!). It was meant to fill a lacuna in Church perspective, practice, and law and make it possible for the first time ever in the universal church to constitute and recognize solitary hermits in law (canonically) as members of the consecrated state. In doing so it extended the category "Religious" to those with no connection to a religious congregation (Handbook on Canons 573-746) --- a very great change in the way the Church thought and practiced.