On the Church's Regard for the Eremitic Vocation and c 603

[[Dear Sister Laurel, was your vocation under this new canon created or caused to be created by a dissenting Bishop? Did he do this because a group of hermit lobbied to force the Church to respect them and their vocations? I heard this from a hermit who does videos.]]

Thanks for your questions. From my perspective, the views you are asking about are erroneous and unhelpfully cynical. Bishop Remi de Roo was not a dissenting bishop. He was a supporter of Vatican II and a whole-hearted supporter at that. Vatican II is a significant part of the Tradition of the Church, and that is true even though it is a relatively recent addition to that Tradition that recovers some very early Tradition. I suppose if you are not particularly in agreement with Vatican II, particularly in its anti-clericalism and its universal call to holiness, you might call Bp de Roo a dissenter, but I would suggest that is simply not the case.

Secondly, Bp de Roo was Bishop-protector for a group of hermits in British Columbia who had left their communities and vows because they felt called by God to even greater solitude than their monasteries allowed. This is sometimes seen as the natural progression of the monastic life, so it ought not surprise us. Most of these men had been Benedictine monks for many years, but living as hermits was something their congregations' proper or particular law did not allow. They loved their communities and were completely committed to "seeking God" as every Benedictine commits to do for the entirety of their life, but in this particular matter, they found themselves having to leave their monasteries and vows in order to seek God in eremitical solitude. Had they wanted the Church's respect, they certainly chose a funny way of going after that. After all, they let go of everything having to do with such a choice, let go of legal standing and positions of influence, relinquished years and years in solemn vows and consecrated life, and chose to be secularized to seek God alone in stricter solitude. (Remember, the Church in the West had no universal canon law governing eremitic life, and hermits, as a vital reality, had almost died out. These men clearly followed God into obscurity in the very best Gospel and Desert fashion.)

Bishop Remi worked with these men for a period of some years, and he knew their lives to be a significant gift to the Church. Through the centuries, Bishops in the Western Church had established local canons to allow for hermits and anchorites in their dioceses, but there had never been a universal law recognizing the vocation. As a result of his experience with these hermits, Bishop Remi de Roo was impressed with the vocation, and as one of the youngest Bishops at Vatican Council II, he made an intervention supporting the recognition of hermit life as a state of perfection. He gave a number of very positive reasons justifying this petition. As I have noted before, these included: 

• 1) The fact of growing renewal of the eremitic life, 
• 2) the sanctifying value of the hermit's life, 
• 3) the hermit's contribution to the life of the church. This would include the hermit's prophetic role, a modeling of the Church's call to contemplation, and the centrality of prayer, being a paradigm of the way we are each called to confront evil within our own lives and world, or allow heaven (God's own life shared with others) to interpenetrate our reality, and a dedicated seeking of God that forms the basis of every Christian life or vocation and witnesses to the truth of the Gospel in a particularly vivid way, 
• 4) the ecumenical value of the hermit's life (especially in dialogue between Eastern and Western Christianity, but also in conversations with Protestantism, supporting the place of lives dedicated to prayer) 
• 5) a correction of the impression that the evangelical counsels are limited to institutionalized community life known as religious life. (This is something post-nominal initials help do, by the way, as does the habit, etc.) Remi De Roo was the Bishop protector of a colony of (more than) 10 -12 hermits. He wrote about these benefits and needs based on the lives lived by these hermits and others and "earnestly request(ed)" the Council "officially recognize the eremitical life as a state of perfection in the Church." (taken from Vita Eremitica Iuxta Can 603, p 137 reporting on Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, vol iii, pars vii, pp 608-609)

When God gives the Church a gift, the only appropriate response is to honor and celebrate it. Bishop Remi recognized the gift and sought to have the Church recognize and honor it universally by providing for it in law for the first time ever. Vatican II led to the revision of the Code of Canon Law, and in Advent of 1983, this revision included two "new" (and ancient) forms of consecrated life: c 603, solitary eremitical life lived under the local bishop's supervision, and c 604, consecrated virginity for women living in the world. There is no sense at all in anything I have been able to read on the subject that the hermits under Bp de Roo's episcopal protection lobbied for this in any way. Certainly, this had nothing to do with some kind of egoistic and vainglorious clamoring for prestige or status.

The eremitical vocation is profoundly countercultural. It isn't an easy vocation, and it needs the support of the Church it both serves and reflects. C 603 hermits live a hiddenness that is very real. They declare with their lives that the journey to union with God is at the heart of every person's call to authentic humanity, and they signal the hiddenness of this pilgrimage in a way that is provocative and, so, paradoxical. Again, by definition, the world militates against such a vocation. The Church, of course, is called to be "in the world but not of it"; hermits are among those called by God to make very sure the Church is true to this calling. We don't do this by running from the world that is God's good creation, nor by turning away from the Church that is an embodied (sacramental) reality rooted in history as well as in eternity. Instead, we do this by rejecting enmeshment in that which is resistant to Christ. 

The Church's recognition of and regard for such vocations (ecclesial vocations to the consecrated state under c 603, for instance) not only assists in the proclamation of the Gospel (every hermit proclaims the truth of the risen Christ and God as Emmanuel in the extraordinary ordinariness of her life here and now), but also helps the Church maintain its own countercultural integrity and witness in the power of the Holy Spirit -- even though the world sometimes makes that very difficult. This public consecrated vocation is not about prestige or status, but instead, the granting and acceptance of standing in law, the canonical embrace of a place of radical humility which the world simply does not understand.