PAUL VI
A NEW AND ORIGINAL
FORM OF CONSACRATION
Beloved sons and
daughters in the Lord,
1. Once more I have
an opportunity to meet you, heads of Secular Institutes, members and representatives of a
portion of the Church which at this historic moment is flourishing, overflowing with
vitality.
2. This time the
occasion which brings you is the International Congress which you have held and are about
to bring to a close here at Nemi close by this summer residence of Castel Gandolfo. In
this Congress you have been giving your critical attention to the statutes of the
"World Conference of Secular Institutes" which is to be created.
3. I will not
attempt to assess your work. I have no doubt that you have worked with the ever-attentive
participation of the Department concerned, earnestly and with deep reflection. I trust you
will bear much fruit and that your numbers will grow. I prefer to linger for a while on a
few reflections upon a possible function of Secular Institutes in the mystery of Christ
and the mystery of the Church.
4. As I look at you
here and think of those thousands upon thousands of men and women that you belong to, I
cannot but feel a deep sense of consolation and joy and gratitude to the Lord. The Church
of Christ as seen in you, is indeed strong and flourishing! Our venerable Mother is today
the object of sharp and shameless carping, and some of her own children are guilty. Some
take a positive pleasure in describing what they imagine to be symptoms of decrepitude.
They talk of impending collapse. Here, to give the lie to their foreboding, is a Church of
new-found treasures, one after another, new paths of holiness, new holy enterprises,
unforeseen, unpredictable. It had to happen, I know, it could not be otherwise: Christ is
the divine inexhaustible source of the Church's vitality. Your presence here today is one
more proof of it. You bring it home to us.
5. Now, peering
more closely at your family likeness in the People of God, I see that (like others in
other sectors of the Church's life) you are mirrors of a special way, a "way of your
own", of reliving the mystery of Christ in the world, and a may, unlike anyone
else's, of making the mystery of the Church visibly present in the world.
6. Christ the
Redeemer is a fullness, a plenitude that we shall never be able to comprehend or
completely express. He is the All for his Church, and, in it, whatever we are we are
through him, simply through him, with him, in him. This means that for you, Secular
Institutes, as for all of us, he is ever the ultimate model, the one from whom all
inspiration comes, the well-spring to which we must go.
7. With Christ the
Saviour for foundation and model, you fulfil, in your own distinctive way, an important
ecclesial mission. But the Church itself is also, in its own way, like Christ, a plenitude
too rich for anyone, or any institution, to comprehend or fully express. Nor could we, who
are members of it, ever explore it completely because its life is Christ, and he is God.
So the Church and its mission can in real terms only be fully expressed in the
multiplicity of its members. It is the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, the
doctrine of gifts and charisms of the Holy Spirit.
8. It will not have
escaped your attention that the drift of what I am saying inevitably poses the question:
How do we fulfil this special role in the mission of the Church? What is your special
gift, your distinctive role, the new factor you bring to today's Church? Or put it this
way. What exactly is your way of "being today's Church? " You know the answer.
You have made it clear to yourselves and to the Church. We can take it as said.
9. You stand at the
confluence of two powerful streams of Christian life and your own life is enriched by
both. You are lay people, consecrated as lay people by baptism and confirmation, but you
have chosen to underline your consecration to God with the profession of the evangelical
counsels, accepted as binding, and the bond is firm and enduring and recognised by the
Church. You are still lay people, committed to the secular values of the lay state of life
(Lumen Gentium, 31), but with you it is a matter of "consecrated
secularity",[1]
you are both secular, living as lay people in the world and consecrated .[2]
11. Neither of
these two aspects of your spiritual image can be overestimated without damaging the other.
They are essential to each other.
12.
"Secularity" means that your place is in the world. But it does not mean simply
a position, a function which happens to coincide with life in the world and a
"secular" job or profession. It must mean, first and foremost a realisation that
you are in the world as "your very own field of Christian responsibility. To be in
the world, that is, to be committed to secular values, is your way of being the Church, of
making the Church present, of working out your own salvation and being heralds of
redemption. The condition in which you live, your life-description in human society
becomes your theological self and your way of bringing salvation into the realm of reality
for all the world to see. In this way you are an advance guard of the Church "in the
world": you are yourselves an expression of the Church's mind: to be in the world in
order to shape it and sanctify it "as from within, like leaven in the dough" (Lumen
Gentium, 31) - a task, remember which falls mainly on the shoulders of the laity. You
are a clear, tangible, telling proof of what the Church sets out to do for the building of
the world of "Gaudium et spes ".
13.
"Consecration", on the other hand, indicates the personal, unseen structure
supporting your inmost self and all you do. Here is the deep, hidden human potential for
which the people you live with have no explanation, often no idea. Your baptismal
consecration has been more deeply and strongly rooted by a greater claim of love. It is
the stirring of the Holy Spirit. It is not identical with that of Religious. Nevertheless
it impels you to a fundamental life-option of the beatitudes of the Gospel, so that you
are really consecrated and really in the world. "You are in the world and not of the
world but for the world" as I said on another occasion.[3]
You live a true, genuine consecration according to the evangelical counsels but without
the fullness of visibility proper to religious consecration which consists in a more
strictly common way of life and the "sign" of the religious habit. Yours is a
new and original form of consecration. It was the Holy Spirit that put this idea into the
minds of the faithful, so that they could live in this way, still surrounded by the
world's realities and that the power of evangelical counsels - the divine values of
eternity - should find their way into the heart of human, space-time values.
14. The poverty,
chastity and obedience which you have chosen are ways of sharing the cross of Christ
because like him and with him you give up the things which, without any infringement of
law or precept, you could, if you wished, have and enjoy. But they are also ways of
sharing the victory of the Risen Christ because they give you a new freedom. This world's
values are always a threat to our openness of soul, complete availability to God.
Your vows take
the sting out of it. Your poverty tells the world that it is possible to live with this
life's good things and that we can make use of what makes for a more civilised life and
progress without becoming slaves to any of it; your chastity tells the world of a selfless
love, fathomless as God's own heart from which you draw it. Your obedience tells the world
that a man can be happy without digging in his heels over the things which just suit him,
and can be always completely open to God's will as seen in the daily grind, in the signs
of the times and in the world's need, here and now, of salvation.
15. Hence your
activity, whatever it may be, personal, professional, individual or common, is more
distinctly signposted "To God": it is in fact all the time interwoven with your
consecration and carried along with it. The unique providential way of things in your
spirituality has given today's Church a new model - secular life lived in consecration,
consecrated life lived as secular. The Church is the richer for it.
16. Of all the good
things brought into the world by Secular Institutes there is one upon which I would like
to dwell for a moment í´¨e tributary stream of consecrated ministerial priesthood which
flows into the Secular Institutes carrying a goodly band of men who wish to add to their
priestly life the bond of self-giving which is profession of the evangelical counsels. As
I think of these brothers of mine in the priesthood of Christ, I feel that I must
encourage them. Here once more I see, and wonder at, the work of the Spirit ceaselessly
rousing in men's hearts a restless-yearning for greater perfection.
] 7. All I have
said up to now applies to them too, yes, but in them it calls for reflection on a deeper
level and careful qualification. They seek and find consecration in the evangelical
counsels and commitment to "secular" values not as laymen but as clerics,
channels of the sacred to the People of God.
18. Besides Baptism
and Confirmation, the fundamental consecration of every lay person in the Church, they
have received the differentiating sacrament of Orders and this has given them a specific
ministry with regard to the Eucharist and the Mystical Body of Christ.
19. Their
"secular" Christian vocation is what it was; they can now find more in it,
living it as consecrated in Secular Institutes, but their spiritual life in this condition
must be other than what is normally required of the member, and there will be a visible
difference in the way in which they follow the Counsels and in their secular commitment
20. In conclusion I
want to make a most urgent appeal, as your father: keep, before all else, keep alive and
growing in your hearts, your union, communion, in and with the Church. You are living
joints in the body of this ecclesial communion - you too are the Church. I would never,
never weaken those joints. Anything ecclesial is unthinkable outside the Church. Don't be
taken off your guard in this. Keep your hearts well clear of the temptation - so seductive
in these days - to think that you can have true communion with Christ and yet be out of
tune out of accord, with the ecclesial community governed by lawful pastors. It would be a
snare and a delusion. What can an individual do, or a group, with the best of intentions
and the highest of ideals, outside this communion? Christ requires it of us as a condition
of communion with him, just as he requires our love of each other as proof of our love of
him.
21. So you are of
Christ and for Christ in his Church; and Church means your local community, your
Institute, your parish, but always in communion of faith, of Eucharist, of discipline and
of loyal, faithful collaboration with your Bishop and the Hierarchy. Your structures and
activities, be you clerical or lay, must never produce divergent orientations, as if you
took your bearings from two different points of the compass. They must never create
"justified non-involvement ", either interior or exterior, nor (worst of all)
antagonism against the pastors.
22. These are the
things I put before you hopefully: they represent my wishes for your welfare. Thus I hope
that you may be, in the midst of the world, true labourers for the one saving mission of
the Church, in your very own way to which you have been called and invited. Thus may the
Lord help you to prosper yet more, to bring forth yet greater fruit, ever with the
Apostolic Blessing which I give you.
Castel Gandolfo,
20th September 1972
* The original text is in Italian.
[1] Paul VI, Address to the Heads and Members of Secular Institutes on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of "Provida Mater".
[2]
Pope Paul VI,
Address to International Congress, 26.9.70.
[3]
To the First
International Congress of Secular Institutes, n. 16, 26.9.1970.