Do Dioceses Profess c 603 Hermits Who do not Believe in c 603 Vocations?

[[Sister Laurel, do dioceses profess hermits under c 603 who don't believe in c 603? How about people who attack c 603 every chance they get and then request to become a diocesan hermit? I know you will see these are rhetorical questions. I am aware of a situation where someone who seems never to have had a good thing to say about can. 603 is requesting to be made a can. 603 hermit. How can this be?? Will her diocese profess her? I am just so outraged by the whole situation I don't even know what to ask you. I do think I know now why this "hermit" insists on remaining anonymous!!! 

She has waffled back and forth on c 603 for years I think, and how it is a distortion of the tried and true way to be a hermit, and now how it is tainted by some canonical hermit in California she doesn't care for at all (yes, that's you I think) and says the canon may not have been the will of God in the first place. The words that come to mind for me are jealous and hypocrite!! And now she is claiming because it has only been 10 weeks since she applied for canonical approval and she has heard almost nothing from her diocese, they are disrespecting her and care nothing about her vocation and she is trash-talking the "temporal Church" for their priorities (or lack thereof!!). 

I wonder if they have discovered her videos or blogs and are giving them a close look. She vlogged recently that they should be doing that with your blog. Well, if it should be done to you it should be done to her! Far from not taking her seriously, they may be taking her more seriously than she really wants! I read your post,"On Intervening in Cases of Fraud." It sounds like you have dealt with something like this before. If I knew who this person really is I would call or write her diocese myself because they need to know there are big concerns with professing her. God only knows the damage she has left in her wake in the past and then moved on from by using "anonymity" to protect her from being exposed.!! Oh, one question though I have assumed the answer: are you the canonical hermit in California joyful/christian/hermit trash-talks so routinely?]]

Thanks for your comments. Please know that I understand what you are feeling and have felt some of the same impulses myself. In general, I have only heard of a diocese professing someone who does not believe they truly have a c 603 vocation once, and no one who believes c 603 itself is some sort of mistake or ill-conceived merely human creation. How could a diocese do this without risking an invalid profession and/or consecration and a possible scandal for the faithful? Ordinarily, unless one has some ulterior motive, one petitions for admission to profession and consecration because one truly believes in one's heart of hearts that God is calling them to this vocation and one has found it to be their personal path to human wholeness and holiness!! Dioceses assume this is the reason one is petitioning and may be very surprised when they find it is not so.

Even so, given a candidate's long history of denigrating the canon, it is not a good idea to profess them simply because they claim they want to do what the bishop accepts is the normative way for hermits to go these days!! Since there are both canonical and non-canonical hermits today and since most will not be made canonical, neither does the argument about wanting "unity" carry much weight, especially when the one making this argument does not want anything to do with the "temporal Church", and does not attend church or receive the sacraments otherwise. Canon 603 is not obligatory. it is one option among several for some hermits. the basic question that should be asked is, if one cannot take on the ordinary rights and obligations of a lay Catholic, why should one be admitted to the additional rights and obligations of a canonical hermit? Many of us deal with chronic illness and disability including that from chronic pain; we still find ways to participate regularly in the Church's sacramental life.

For instance, if one wants to be a hermit and believes c 603 is not divinely inspired, one can become (or remain) a non-canonical (lay) hermit. (Apparently, the person you are writing about seems to have said recently that if the diocese decides to profess her, she will agree the canon is inspired and willed by God! Until then the question of the canon's divinely inspired character is an open question for her.) But, this kind of nonsense aside, to pursue profession under c 603 is a serious matter (the profession itself is an act of worship) and if one does not truly feel called to this, then it can become a serious act of dishonesty or fraud which then obligates others to act on their knowledge to prevent the situation from rising to the level of scandal. In the blog piece you referred to I said the following and still believe it completely: 

[[. . . I need to say that any person with genuine knowledge directly impacting the nature and quality (and this can include even the validity) of a public profession has not just the right but the obligation to share that knowledge in an appropriate way. Moreover, bishops and others involved in overseeing such vocations have the obligation to hear and seriously consider these concerns. Public professions involve ecclesial vocations which affect the entire Church. They are also public acts of worship and if there is actual deception or fraud at their heart, such an act of worship can become a serious scandal and that can rise to the level of sacrilege. It can also invalidate the profession being made -- one source of the scandal involved. When we are dealing with Canon 603 professions where the total number of solitary canonical hermits are, relatively speaking, so very few, and the vocation is both rare and even more rarely understood --- and also because dioceses are cautious in dealing with the implementation of C 603 anyway --- serious scandal can affect the credibility of the entire vocation. When this happens, genuine vocations to C 603 life are likely to be further prevented from being professed by the Church --- a kind of functional suppression of the solitary consecrated eremitical vocation.]] On Intervening in Cases of Fraud

There is an incredible irony in the situation you referred to and this is one of the things that can happen if a diocese entertains this person's petition for profession without learning enough about her attitudes toward c 603. In one instance, we have someone who has written for years and now speaks on videos about how flawed c 603 is and how little Bishops actually know about "real hermits" or hermit life. And yet she is putting herself in the hands of a diocese that may or may not profess her as a canonical hermit. If they do not realize how she feels about c 603 and take that into account, they will look foolish and underscore her complaints about dioceses not knowing the people they profess/consecrate. 

Perhaps this is one reason she is doing this --- because whether she is accepted for profession or dismissed as unsuitable, she can then claim she is a victim of others not understanding her and once again "proving" how very little bishops and dioceses know about or respect "real" eremitical life. (At the same time, she also claims real hermits don't need or want to be respected so complaining now that the diocese is not giving her vocation the regard it deserves is a bit rich and ironic all by itself! If a miniscule 10 weeks of waiting has her feeling disrespected (after all, she is already a hermit living what she believes is her vocation!) one would think she would be reveling in it, given her claims about authentic hermits being completely unseen and treated as "nothing".) In any case, she sets things up so she can also pull out of the process of discernment herself while claiming the canon is problematical and merely a human invention that God disapproves of. Whether the diocese accepts or rejects her petition, it is apt to be a win-win situation for her that leaves chaos in her wake. 

Your own Course of Action:

I want to encourage you to pay attention to your own sense of what you need to do in this situation. At the same time, I would strongly encourage you not to act in anger and generally to follow the other steps I provided in that post. Concerns may be significant or more trivial, so be clear about what these are for you, and that you can articulate them in a cogent way for those who truly need to hear them. Meanwhile, should you decide you need to take action, the person's diocese is readily identifiable from videos she has posted in the last couple of months. It can be verified for you.

Meanwhile, while you must act as you believe is right, I will also consider whether there is any need for me to contact the diocese in this matter. Currently, I don't believe there is; I believe the Diocese will not accept this person for admission to profession, much less to consecration as a c 603 hermit because of a canonical impediment due to a prior marriage. Obviously, there are other reasons as well (including past blogs, the videos, and the inconsistencies these produce regarding this person's vision of eremitical life and attitude toward the canon), but this one impediment is the least complicated most straightforward reason to refuse admission to profession. I also suspect that the decision has already been made, but I don't know this. Thus, I too will continue to pray about the matter and do what I believe is best for the c 603 vocation.

Postscript: Yes, I am the hermit from California this person writes and videos about, though I can rarely recognize myself from what she claims. While California is a big state, so far as I know, it only has two c 603 hermits and only one with a blog.

Should Hermits or their Vocations be Respected?

 [[ Hi Sister, Joyful Hermit is putting up videos (cf  Joyful Hermit Speaks) saying that if a hermit needs to have their vocation esteemed and celebrated at a public liturgy, maybe they should wait to become a diocesan hermit until they understand the vocation better. She suggested it is up to the hermit to tell the Bishop that saint hermits would never agree with a public Mass and lots of people [attending], etc. I heard her saying that it is up to the hermit to take responsibility about where and how her consecration would occur, so, the whole piece is about telling the bishop what is appropriate!! I also heard her challenging diocesan hermits who had public Masses with numbers attending of lacking not only understanding of the hermit vocation but also humility as well.]]

Thanks for writing, and for the link. I watched the video and I essentially heard what you did. It seems to me that this video was apparently in partial response to my post on the appropriateness of celebrating hermit professions at Mass. The idea that a hermit who has been admitted to profession and (in time) even to consecration by this local Church would tell her diocese (Canonists, liturgists, Vicars, and Bishop), that despite what the Rubrics for the Rite of Perpetual Profession say, the hermit knows better and that having a Mass (when appropriate) is up to her, is completely ludicrous to me. This is an ecclesial event, not merely a personal one!! In any case, JH's position proves the case, I think, that she does not understand what it means to have an ecclesial and public vocation with responsibilities to the Church (the People of God) and rights they have granted to her.  

Your referent makes this all about c 603 hermits demonstrating a lack of humility, both by agreeing to a public Mass and in petitioning for and accepting canonical standing in the first place. She rails against anyone respecting a hermit or esteeming a God-given ecclesial vocation and claims that no self-respecting hermit (pun intended) would ever desire this. She claims that if a hermit needs esteem, then perhaps they are not ready to become a c 603 hermit. 

But to whom is she speaking? No one is talking about hermits needing to be esteemed in some unhealthy way! No one is talking about a hermit demanding a public Mass, seeking canonical standing, or anything else because they need esteem or the respect of others in a disproportionate and egoistically-driven way!! On the contrary, we are speaking about the fact that every person both deserves and needs respect as a human being. This is a fundamental need that is vital to our being able to love ourselves or others as well as allowing ourselves to be loved by others. In the work I do, respect is recognized as an essential need, as necessary to health and life as air and water and food and sunshine. If a hermit cannot admit that they need and are due respect -- just as every other person in, or dimension of God's good creation needs and deserves respect --- then they are apparently so completely out of touch with their own God-given and divinely-valued humanity, that they should give up even the pretense of being a hermit!! They will only ever be a parody or caricature of such a thing --- and God knows, we have had enough of those through the centuries!

I am thinking of the words of the Magnificat. [[My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on (or, he has esteemed or regarded) his lowly servant, and from this day all generations will call me blessed! The almighty has done great things for me and Holy is his Name.]] When I write about the Church coming to esteem the eremitical vocation as a gift of God, I am writing about regard for the favor, esteem, or regard of God's grace. Never were a woman and her vocation given more respect or held in higher esteem. At the same time, never was there such a humble woman!! The two things are not contradictory, they do not cancel each other out somehow; they belong together. To know (in that deep Biblical sense of the term,) that one's vocation means to be aware that one is favored by God, does not mean one lacks humility. It is a simple recognition of truth which is the very root of humility. To accept that from God, including through the mediation of the Church, and doing so in joy and love is the act of a humble person!!!

Yes, there have been unhealthy forms of spirituality throughout the centuries and so-called "hermits" have been among their most notorious representatives. Some were guilty of self-loathing and, I would argue, some forms of penance or asceticism were the outworking of such self-hatred. All this is part of the reason the Church took such a long time to recognize eremitical life as a potential state of perfection or consecrated life. However, the notion that c 603 was only created to prevent abuses and not to demonstrate esteem for a divine gift to the Church is blatant ignorance. To suggest as well that no real hermit needs God's favor or regard -- much less that of the Church!-- or that they should not need to be able to respect themselves, in turn, is to deform the vocation into something destructive and incapable of serving either God or others. Instead, it betrays the eremitical vocation and the God who is its author.

One of the witnesses hermits give is to the singular favor God holds for and reveals (or at least seeks to reveal) to every individual no matter how ill, weak, poor, inadequate, etc they might be otherwise. God esteems each of us, calls us to be his beloved,  loves and cherishes us with an everlasting love, and completes us so we might witness to all of this for the sake of others. God respects or values our humanity sufficiently to become one of us and to welcome us into God's own life in the Ascension. I wrote recently about the glorified bodily existence we will one day know in God's eternal presence. God esteems us in this way; he loves us dearly and calls us to be his adopted daughters and sons. He sends us out as disciples of Christ to minister (and hermits he sends into solitude to become ministers --- embodiments of the very ministry they are called to.). Can we really suggest that none of that demonstrates respect, esteem, or regard? Can we really affirm that we do not need respect, esteem, or regard from God (or from others, including our colleagues and superiors) simply to stand on two feet and face the day?? 

To repeat the position that kicked off your referent's comments on this, the Church chose to make the solitary eremitical vocation a canonical one. She did so because she believed it to be a gift of God to the Church and showed that she esteemed this vocation precisely as a gift of God, not because hermits were giving her problems (in fact, solitary hermits had almost totally ceased to exist in the Western Church; all the Church had to do was to ignore any that remained to ensure that death spiral was completed). Even if this was untrue, one does not give someone canonical standing simply to correct abuses. Besides, without officially recognizing (and thus, esteeming) hermit life in law, what abuses would there be?? A standard or norm must be established in law before there can be abuses. In any case, esteem for this relatively rare gift of God to the Church was why c 603 came into existence; it was the reason Bishop Remi de Roo made an intervention at the Second Vatican Council to ask the Church to recognize eremitical life as a call to a state of perfection or consecrated state. De Roo had come to know this vocation through the dozen or so hermits he served as Bishop Protector for in British Columbia; as a result, he recognized the prophetic gift to the Church this vocation is. 

In the celebrations the Church holds, the one being celebrated is never primarily the hermit herself (though she is also being assisted to embrace, and thanked for saying yes to God's call as she returns self-gift for self-gift); it is God who is being celebrated and what God's gift of Self means for people in our world. The hermit who is being consecrated by God celebrates this by receiving God's gift of self, a gift that consecrates specially, within an assembly of the People of God. That is why it is appropriate to do this at Mass! Mass is the place where we are quintessentially recipients and God is the Giver par excellence; it is the place where we are each made a unique part of the People of God and God is made real in space and time in, with, and for us! What an appropriate context for the consecration of a canonical hermit!! In terms of this more limited discussion, however, let me simply repeat, a canon 603 vocation, like any other gift of God, is worthy of respect, especially when we contrast this contemporary vocation with the centuries-long background of eccentric and misanthropic stereotypes that populated the world through the centuries --- and evidently in some ways, into this one as well.