Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious

The New Evangelization
Revisiting the Sacraments

February 2012 - Religious Consecration

The Foundations of Religious Life, pp. 21-23. Mother Agnes Mary Donovan, S.V.

Religious Consecration: A New and Special Bond Sister Mary Elizabeth Wusinich, S.V.

Baptismal consecration, in which Christ takes “possession of a person from within,”[1] is the foundation for religious consecration, in which the whole of one’s life is set apart for the sacred. Religious consecration is seen as a flowering of this fundamental consecration to God, the purpose of which

is to scale the heights of love: a complete love, dedicated to Christ under the impulse of the Holy Spirit and, through Christ, offered to the Father: hence the value of the oblation and consecration of religious profession, which in Eastern and Western Christian tradition is considered as a baptismus flaminis, inasmuch as a person’s heart is moved by the Holy Spirit to believe in and love God, and to repent of his sins (ST, III, q. 66, a. 11).[2]

While religious consecration is a flowering of baptismal consecration, it is also a new and distinct bond, which cannot be considered an implication of or a logical consequence of baptism. “Religious consecration, instead, means the call to a new life that implies the gift of an original charism not granted to everyone, as Jesus states when He speaks of voluntary celibacy (cf. Mt. 19:10-12). Hence, it is a sovereign act of God, who freely chooses, calls, opens a way that is certainly connected with the baptismal consecration, but is distinct from it.”[3] Vita consecrata considers religious profession in the Church’s tradition as a “special and fruitful deepening of the consecration received in baptism,” by which one’s union with Christ develops into a “fuller, more explicit and authentic configuration to him.” This call entails a development and maturation of baptismal consecration to which not all the faithful are called.

This further consecration, however, differs in a special way from baptismal consecration, of which it is not a necessary consequence. In fact, all those reborn in Christ are called to live out, with the strength that is the Spirit’s gift, the chastity appropriate to their state in life, obedience to God and to the Church, and a reasonable detachment from material possession: for all are called to live in holiness, which consists in the perfection of love. But baptism in itself does not include the call to celibacy or virginity, the renunciation of possessions or obedience to a superior, in the form proper to the evangelical counsels. The profession of the evangelical counsels thus presupposes a particular gift of God not given to everyone, as Jesus himself emphasizes with respect to voluntary celibacy.[4]

Being set apart for the sacred through religious consecration is different from the renunciation of the world promised at baptism. While baptism separates Christians from moral evil in the world,

[1] Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (SCRSI), Essential Elements, 6.

[2] John Paul II, Audience, Rome, 1994. The passage continues: “In a similar way, it can be said that the profession of the evangelical counsels further develops the consecration received in the Sacrament of Confirmation. It is a new gift of the Holy Spirit, conferred for the sake of an active Christian life in a closer bond of collaboration and service to the Church in order to produce, through the evangelical counsels, new fruits of holiness and apostleship in addition to the demands of the consecration received in Confirmation. The Sacrament of Confirmation—and the character of Christian soldiering and Christian apostleship that it entails—is also at the root of the consecrated life.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] John Paul II, Vita consecrata, 30.

religious profession of the evangelical counsels separates the one called to such profession from many of the good things of the world for the sake of the Kingdom. This illustrates the difference between commandments (which oblige one to avoid sin) and counsels (which provide the means to overcome the obstacles to the attainment of the good, that is, the perfection of charity). This new title of belonging to God “entails a sacrifice of joys and legitimate goods, a sacrifice which the consecrated person accepts willingly to give witness to the supreme rights of God and his own adherence to him as his only love, in imitation of Jesus chaste, poor and obedient.”[5]

In his apostolic exhortation to religious, Redemptionis Donum, John Paul II develops the specific way in which the religious is more closely conformed to Christ through a “new” bond by uniting the complete oblation of their lives with his Paschal sacrifice: “Religious profession is a new ‘burial in the death of Christ’: new, because it is made with awareness and choice; new, because of love and vocation; new, by reason of unceasing ‘conversion.’ This ‘burial in death’ causes the person ‘buried together with Christ’ to ‘walk like Christ in newness of life.’”

As the act of prostration in the rite of perpetual profession suggests, the vows affect a certain death in the person. The religious is laying down her life, in order to enter as fully as possible into the Paschal mystery, to arise a new creation in Christ. John Paul II in Redemptionis Donum, within the section titled “Religious Profession as a ‘Fuller Expression’ of Baptismal Consecration,” proclaims:

The depth and power of being rooted in Christ is decided precisely by religious profession. Religious profession creates a new bond between the person and the One Triune God, in Jesus Christ. This bond develops on the foundation of the original bond that is contained in the sacrament of baptism. Religious profession is “deeply rooted in baptismal consecration and is a fuller expression of it.” In this way religious profession, in its constitutive content, becomes a new consecration: the consecration and giving of the human person to God, loved above all else.[6]

The religious desires to live a eucharistic life. Participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes the daily focal point in which one renews the gift and sacrifice of self, made on the day of profession, uniting oneself to Christ’s self-offering along with the particular joys and sorrows of the day. Seeking to imitate the self-emptying of Christ (see Philippians 2:5–8), the religious is molded by the Lord’s Pasch so that she may abide in Christ and Christ in her for the redemption of the world.[7] It is in and through her humanity that the invisible reality of God is made visible in the world today.

[5] Gambari, Religious Life, 91.

[6] John Paul II, Redemptionis donum, 7. See also CCC, 1214, 1239.

[7] Cf. Tillard, Religious Life, 80–84: What is the baptismal perfection to which religious life constantly tends? First and essentially, it is the impregnation in us and the sealing of us with the Pasch of the Lord Jesus in its two inseparable moments of death and resurrection. . . . But this is not primarily a “conquest” by strength of arm, a mobilization of all one’s energies for the reproduction of an external model that is transcendent and actually always inaccessible. It is rather a mystery that is completely interior. It is a mustering of oneself in order to permit one to be gradually fashioned by the paschal power of the Lord who wishes to “assimilate” us to Himself, to make us become Him, to lead us to an ever more realistic and total communion in His death-resurrection. Baptism and subsequently the Eucharist have sown in us, as it were, a paschal seed that seeks to overcome us. Christ wishes to imitate Himself in us. . . . If to sanctify oneself means essentially to “reproduce” Christ in oneself, this is not a matter of copying an external model but of an imitation through “active communion” with the Lord who seeks to assimilate us to Himself. Radically, “to imitate Christ” is to permit oneself to be penetrated by the power of His Pasch. . . . It is then a death that is an invitation as the death and dissolution of a grain of wheat are an invitation of the ripened ear. The more there grows in us the detachment from everything that shuts us within ourselves and that thus prevents us from giving ourselves to God, the more and to the same measure is there inscribed in the void the image of the Lord Jesus rising up from the death and pervaded by the glory of the Father.”

Through the total gift of self of the religious, Jesus again finds a dwelling place on earth, and seeks to assimilate the one consecrated to himself. “Consecrated persons make visible, in their consecration and total dedication, the loving and saving presence of Christ, the One consecrated by the Father, sent in mission. Allowing themselves to be won over by him (see Philippians 3:12), they prepare to become, in a certain way, a prolongation of his humanity.”[8] The love, mercy, and providence of God are made tangible and real to people of every age through the religious who becomes a sign and vehicle of His presence and action in the world today. It is through this entrance into the Paschal mystery that a religious is conformed to Christ and discovers her deepest identity: “And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:22-23).

[8] John Paul II, Vita consecrata, 76.